alone among the wreck
by irishais
Summary: Garden will always drag them back. Seifer/Quistis, Edea, Squall/Rinoa. (Hallowed Ground series.)
1. time it took us

_**alone among the wreck**_

_-irishais-_

**ONE. **

Her once-beloved son has a daughter.

She learns this fact from Squall Leonhart, of all people, who comes back to the orphanage to visit one day out of the blue. She greets him at the docks, where he ties off a Garden-issue boat, and makes him a cup of tea. She keeps forgetting that he prefers coffee, but he sips at the drink anyway, just to indulge her.

It seems like there's a lot of that going around, _indulging_ her, as if her simple desires are just a second's whim. But this is all she wants from life, really, for the children she took care of for so long to visit her and talk to her and to watch them grow up. Too few of them do- Selphie, occasionally, or Zell. She doesn't remember exactly when Quistis stopped calling. Squall comes every so often, always alone. Rinoa stays away from the orphanage. Edea doesn't blame her.

This is a place of magic, now, of betrayal and lies and the ghost-remnant laughter of small children running through the halls. It is haunted.

They make small talk, about Garden, about his temporary job (and how he loathes it, so much that he has come across the sea to escape it). Edea asks after all of her children—he tells her Quistis just gave birth, that she and Seifer have a baby girl.

She wants to pepper him with a million questions and he surprises her by saying he actually has a photograph. Squall manages to bring it up on his impossibly small phone; when he passes it to her, Edea handles it carefully, afraid she will break it. There is a child, there. A tiny, delicate thing, with thin tubes taped to her skin and a pink cap on her little head, which rests on her father's shoulder. Seifer's face is half-turned to the camera, like someone said his name and surprised him.

"Quistis sent me that a couple of days ago," Squall says. "I thought you might like to see it."

He knows about the adoption, about the fact that Seifer is not just some little orphan boy she raised until he was old enough to go to war- that he is her _son_, and while he may not have come from her loins, that is a connection she will never have with any of the other children who have come and gone.

The picture makes her deliriously happy and deeply sad all at once. She looks at it for a long time, studying her son, the tilt of his head, the half-smile on his lips, one hand gently resting on his daughter's back, and she cannot help but notice how the child has his eyes, the same greenglass gaze. This is his private happiness, a smile she longs to see again in the flesh. She should not be privy to such an intimate moment. She doesn't deserve it.

"What's her name?" Edea asks.

"Hana," Squall tells her.

"Hana," she repeats, letting it roll off of her tongue and out into the air, where it floats like a lullaby. _Happiness, flower, most favored_. "What's wrong with her?" The tubes are so worrisome.

"Premature." Squall shrugs. "I don't know much else. Quistis says she's doing well, though."

The small, fragile part of Edea Kramer that is still _her_ thinks that she should not have had to find out about her grandchild like this, that Seifer should have called her in joyous celebration, that she should have _been_ there, to help with diapers and feedings and singing the baby to sleep. This child should not be hooked up to any tubes or wires or things that keep her alive. She should be strong and loved and healthy.

Edea doesn't even have a telephone number for her son, to call him and wish him well.

There is the salt-sting of tears in her eyes. "Thank you," Edea says honestly. She cannot tell him precisely what it means to her, to have this little tiny shard of Seifer's life, the boy whom she loved and raised and whose bogeymen she fought off until he went away, gone to Garden at age twelve because he _wanted_ to, and then, suddenly, _she_ became the monster under the bed. He has not spoken to her since the trials after the war, when he asked her one cold, bitter question: _Why_?

"I can print you a copy," Squall says, and she is suddenly aware that she has been looking at the photo for far, far too long.

She would like that, very much. She lets him go into Cid's office, and he returns moments later with a glossy piece of paper, the picture so much bigger than she had imagined it would be. She touches the image of her son's face.

She misses him more than she can say, so much that she thinks she might die from the pain of it.

The next day, she writes him a letter. Cid gives her the address, copied carefully out of Quistis' SeeD file onto the front of a plain envelope.

She gets it back two weeks later with RETURN TO SENDER written across the front of it in sloping capitals. The letters are etched into the envelope, a pen pressed down too hard. She traces their indents with the tip of her finger.

The picture is in a simple white wooden frame, hung on the wall in the living room near one of Squall and Rinoa's wedding photos. She sits in a faded flower-print chair, and spends a great deal of time looking at it.

She wonders if he will ever forgive her. But she knows, deep down, that he never will. She cannot blame him for that.

_xx_

He's got his fingers tangled in Quistis' hair, her body arched under his and her lips whispering _obscene_ suggestions in his ear, when there is a faint, staticky wail from the baby monitor on the nightstand.

They both stop moving, for just a half second. There is silence.

"It's fine," Quistis murmurs. He kisses the curve of her neck, and slides his hand up under the hem of her night shirt. She gasps his name, her arms around his neck. He tugs at the waistband of her underwear, and she lifts her hips to help him. He tosses them somewhere away.

There is another cry, a louder, much more insistent one.

Seifer groans, dropping his head against her shoulder. "_Dammit_."

Quistis presses her lips to his temple. "She's probably just hungry."

"She's _always _hungry." Every goddamned few _hours_, she's hungry. Or she needs her diaper changed, or she just starts crying for something to _do_. Seifer rolls off of Quistis, and rakes his hand back through his hair. She slips out of the bed, smoothing her long t-shirt back down over her hips, and leaves the bedroom. He watches her go, and flops backwards onto the bed.

Just… _one _night. Is that really so much to ask for? At least eight hours? Enough to fool around and then even get some sleep. Aren't there nannies or babysitters or _something_? Hell, he knew it would be work; he was _expecting _it, but it's like their entire fucking lives have come to a standstill.

With a sigh, he sits up. Quistis goes past the door, murmuring something incoherent to the infant in her arms. Seifer walks out of the room and follows her downstairs.

She's balancing Hana against her shoulder and running warm water over a bottle when he walks in; the child screams in hunger and annoyance.

"Could you take her? Just for a second so I can finish this?" Quistis asks, and he nods, lifting his daughter out of her arms.

Hana is tiny, ridiculously small in his hands, but she calms almost as soon as he picks her up, her wailing decreasing to vaguely distressed noises. It's so strange, how this little person has taken to him so immediately. He is terrified of dropping her, hurting her in some way, ever mindful of her head, her limbs, and her small, scrunched face. He treats her like a grenade whose pin has been pulled- carefully, so carefully, just waiting for the explosion.

"Watch her head," Quistis cautions as he carries the child out of the kitchen and into the living room. He sits carefully down the couch.

"She's fine," he tells her. "I know what I'm doing." He damn well should, at this stage in the game, nearly three months in.

"I know, it's just— never mind." She joins him. "Here, I'll feed her."

Seifer shrugs. "It's fine." He takes the bottle, and sits his daughter up on his thigh, supporting her head and back with his left hand. She latches onto the bottle immediately, drinking greedily. He can feel Quistis' eyes on him—when he looks over at her, she glances away.

"Go to sleep," he tells her. "I've got this."

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

She nods and gets up, brushing the tips of her fingers across the back of Hana's head.

After ten minutes, Hana draws her head back from the bottle. He sets it aside, and rests her against his shoulder, patting her back softly. There is a small burp, and she makes a noise of contentment, her little fingers curling against his skin.

It's amazing to him how quickly she has developed, from needing a nest of tubes and extra oxygen and such a small_, _delicate thing that he was afraid if he took his eyes off of her for a second, she would simply vanish. She stayed in the neonatal ICU for almost three weeks, bundled up in an incubator and breathing through a tube. For a while, they weren't sure if she was going to come home at _all. _

He'd found himself spending hours upon hours at the hospital learning how to change a diaper and prepare a bottle, learning how to hold his child and how to tell if she was feverish, the information and the suggestions and the lists of things they should buy and do and books they should read just piling up until he thought his head would explode with the pressure of all of it, because Quistis nearly fucking _died_ giving birth to her, and wasn't there to ease the load.

Everything was _impossible_, a million steps and variables that needed to be taken into account. He'd taken advanced military strategy classes that were fucking easier than this, and those he had barely passed.

It surprised him how scared Quistis was, though, initially unwilling to pick up her daughter without a nurse hovering a few feet away, the frustration in her eyes when Hana would just _cry_ and cry, no matter how many soothing sounds Quistis made; it pissed her the hell off, this thing she wasn't _good _at, immediately. Like it was supposed to be a biological right to not be terrified she was going to fuck this up.

He'd had to reassure her a thousand times that they'd figure it out, that it would be okay. Shit always starts making sense, the more you have to do it.

Under his palm, he can feel his daughter's back rise and fall with the steady rhythm of her breathing, in contented sleep with her belly full, sated for a few more hours until one of them is going to have to drag themselves out of bed and do it all over again. Seifer eases himself up off of the couch, and goes slowly up the stairs.

She stays asleep when he puts her down in her crib.

Quistis is curled up on her side in their bed, watching him as he walks into the room, the dim green light of the baby monitor casting a strange shadow over her nose.

He slips under the covers and strokes her bare hip. "Hey," he murmurs into the back of her neck, his voice a low, suggestive rumble.

She shifts, just a little. He lifts his head.

"What?"

"Nothing. I'm just—more tired than I thought I was."

"Oh." He slips his hand out from under her nightshirt. "Okay. Fine." It comes out more annoyed than he intended it to. He feels like he should apologize. He doesn't.

Quistis sighs. "I'm sorry, Seifer."

He shrugs, and lays on his back, folding his hands behind his head. "It's alright."

"I know—I just—I feel…" She turns over so she's facing him, and her eyes are searching for something.

"What?" he asks.

She curls up against the side of his chest, her fingers cool against his skin. Seifer drapes an arm around her shoulders.

"Nothing," she says finally, and it's not fucking _nothing_, but he rubs soft circles on her back and lets her have her lie. He's just too tired of her mood swings to argue anymore. Her _I love you_ is a whisper in the dark; what he doesn't know is why it sound so—sad.

"Yeah," he says. "You, too."

At five in the morning, he moves to pull his girlfriend closer to him, and wakes up to discover that he's alone. But sleep drags him back down before he can ask any questions.

She doesn't come back until nearly nine, waking him up when she turns on the overhead light. He stirs, slowly; there is a liquid lethargy to him—he cannot remember the last time he's gotten this many hours of sleep in a row.

Quistis' weight settles onto the mattress, the wrong side, his side. Her kiss is feather-soft at the edge of his lips—she traces a line across his mouth. "Good morning," she murmurs. Her kiss gets more insistent, lingering; his brain starts demanding that he pay attention. Her hands skate down his chest, drawing back the blankets; her fingers are cool, an electric chill after the covers' warmth. Her fingers hook into the waist of his sweatpants.

Well, hell, he's not going to argue being woken up like _this. _

For a wonder and a frigging _half_, they are not interrupted at all, even though it's quick and frantic and rushed with the anticipation of _being _interrupted, until afterward, when they're dozing in each other's arms, out of breath and delirious with it, and even the sudden, insistent wail over the monitor can't do much to dampen his good mood.

_xx_

There is a letter addressed to him with postage out of Esthar and no return address, and Seifer tears open the envelope in vague disinterest. It's probably a card. They've been getting a lot of damn cards, so many that they ended up just making a list of people who sent them stuff and tossed the mail five minutes after opening it. He is discovering that Quistis is very big on thank-you notes and phone calls and texts.

This isn't a card, it's a note, written on soft cream-colored paper with a border of flowers. There is a faint smell of perfume, an old familiar scent that he's tried to block out for so damn long. But he is reading the letter before he can stop himself, because he knows the handwriting, has rejected at least a hundred letters just like this one, scrawling _return to sender_ back on the front and leaving it in the mailbox.

She has tricked him this time, with no return label and his name typed out.

_Seifer—_

_I wish you all the best. Please at least let me do that much. I love you._

_-Edea_

Funny, how she doesn't even sign it _Mother_, or _Matron_, or a million other variants of the names he called her right up until he'd been shipped off for Garden because his damn father had thought it would build character in a rebellious pre-teen boy.

Edea has never been his _mother_; his mother was some drug-addled teenager who sold him off to strangers. His last name might have once been legally _Kramer_ but that is a badge he has long since torn off and discarded, back when Seifer decided it would be easier for him to fit in when he wasn't immediately, _obviously_ the headmaster's kid. It doesn't fucking matter. He'll wear his junkie mother's name until he dies, because he'd rather be born of nothing than branded a witch's son.

Quistis cannot even _remember _her family.

He'd kill to have that, the absence of this betrayal and anger and a million times _why_ living inside of his head. Seifer can't even remember if he'd ever called her _Mom_ to her face; the GFs Garden crammed into his skull leave his childhood full of gaping holes.

He must have. He _had _to. That's who she was, until she wasn't his mother anymore, and he wasn't some chickenshit-scared little boy.

-_boy or man, boy or man—_

"What's that?" Quistis asks, and he crumples the letter into a ball, dropping it onto the table.

"Nothing important," Seifer says. "You ready to go?"

She double-checks the contents of the diaper bag on the table, and nods. "Yes."

They leave the house with enough stuff to stock a small country, or one tiny infant. He throws the letter in the trash can before they go.

_xx_

This is how she sees her son for the first time in seven years:

Seifer is standing with his back to her, wearing a dark blue t-shirt and dark-washed jeans, facing a bookshelf in the children's section of Dollet's one bookstore, his hand outstretched to pull at the spine of something on the shelf. She knows it's him, immediately. No one else can simply stand and look that imposing. She would know him anywhere.

Quistis is near him, bouncing the child in her arms, and she looks almost like Edea remembers; a little softer, maybe, just around the edges. Not so many angles.

It is Quistis who sees her first, and stops mid-step, subconsciously adjusting her weight into battle-readiness. Edea has seen enough SeeDs to know exactly what the other woman is doing. The child shifts and stares at her mother, little arms reaching up.

"Hey," Seifer says, holding up something he has taken off the shelf, "what about this one?"

He gets no response, and glances over at Quistis. His profile is still strong and clean and his hair is still combed back away from his face, but less meticulously than he used to wear it, blond wisps falling over his forehead. "Babe?" he asks again, and Edea now knows he has a nickname for the woman he loves.

She remembers him as a very, very small boy, learning to say _mama_ for the first time.

"Edea," Quistis says, and her voice is oddly pitched. "What are you doing here?"

And then her son sees her, and she is _expecting _this reaction, the way his face tightens and the scowl etches itself on his face, but she doesn't expect how badly it _hurts-_

"Seifer," she says. "I'm so glad to see you."

"Get the hell out of here," he snarls, and there is so much _anger _in his tone.

She takes a step closer. "Is that— is she your child?" As if she doesn't know, like the long travel from Centra to Balamb and then straight into his neighborhood was a coincidence.

He steps further into her path, blocking her from seeing the little girl—her _granddaughter_, so close, so much lovelier than the snapshot she has in the half-glimpse Edea gets before his body obscures her view.

"What the _fuck_ are you doing here?" he demands.

"I just— I just wanted to see you. I wanted to see Hana." She can tell by the way his eyes widen and then narrow again that he has no idea how she found out about his daughter's name.

"No," he tells her. "You don't get to see her. You need to get back on the fucking ferry or the goddamned train or your fucking _broom_, and get _out_."

"I sent so many letters…"

"I sent them all _back_. That should've told you something."

Quistis, gentle, wise Quistis, says, "Seifer— it's alright. She doesn't mean you any harm."

"She's here. That's _harm _enough." His words are acidic.

"Please," Edea whispers. "Just— I know you can't forgive me, but at least…" _At least let me see her, at least let me say I'm sorry. _She wants so desperately to go back to when he used to come running to her, with a paper sword and a paper shield, and tell her that he was going to protect her from all their invisible demons.

"Go to hell," he says flatly.

"_Please_," she whispers. Behind him, the child starts crying, and the sound tears at Edea's heart.

But he turns away from her, and lifts his daughter out of Quistis' arms, and Edea gets a glimpse of soft blonde curls, of the curve of a tiny body, so small against his large frame, and then he is gone.

"I'm sorry," Quistis says softly. "I really am."

"No," Edea says, "I should be the one to apologize. I knew he would be upset." She doesn't blame him. She cannot blame him for anything, not after the nightmare she put him through—that _Ultimecia_ put him through, wearing her face.

"I should go." Quistis shifts an overlarge bag on her shoulder. "I'll try to talk to him, okay?"

Edea nods. "Thank you." It is all she can ask for, and she can't even ask for that much.

_xx_

He's treading a path into the damn sidewalk at the edge of the parking lot, trying to calm Hana down, when someone puts their hand on his back and startles the shit out of him.

It is Quistis. She's got that pissed off Instructor expression on her face that means he's done something wrong in her book, and this time, he knows it's not his damn fault.

"What the hell was I supposed to do?" he snaps. "She just shows up out of nowhere and I'm supposed to let her back into my life?"

"She's your mother—" Quistis begins, and she should know _so much better _than to tell him that to his face.

"Bull_shit_. She hasn't been my mother for a long goddamned time, and I don't have any interest in letting her reprise the role now." She hasn't been his _mother_ since she mind-fucked him into following her into the mouth of hell, and he doesn't fucking _care _how much control Ultimecia had over her, because there are some goddamned things your mother _does not do to you_, like—

-_claws over his skin and her voice not her voice and he is _helpless_—_

He derails that train of thought right in its fucking tracks, because there are things that he never wants to _ever_ remember about the Sorceress War, and that particular memory is pretty fucking high on the list.

Quistis takes Hana back from him, uncurling tiny fingers from their grip on his shirt. "You need to calm down," she tells him in a level tone. "Go take a walk or something. We'll talk about this at home."

Seifer turns on his heel and goes, away from her, away from Hana, away from the goddamned _ghost_ that follows him everywhere, a spectre in black and horns and feathers.

He walks for a long time, and then he passes a bar, and Seifer goes inside.

_xx_

She's sitting in the recliner with the newspaper folded precisely in her lap when he walks in hours later. He ignores her, and goes upstairs.

He is waiting for the shower to heat up when she walks into the bathroom. She scrutinizes him, and Seifer ditches his pants and steps under the pounding stream of still-cold water just to avoid her gaze.

"Are you drunk?" she asks, finally.

"Does it matter?"

She sighs, and he imagines her pinching the bridge of her nose like she always does. Seifer upends the shampoo bottle over his hand and squeezes the last quarter-sized remnant out of the container.

"No," she says finally. "I guess it doesn't."

"Glad we had this talk, then." He scrubs the shampoo into his hair and rinses it out.

"Seifer… sweetheart, you've got to talk to her. At least listen to what she has to say, and then if you still can't forgive her, at least you know."

She _tries_, with the endearment. He gives her that much.

He tugs back the edge of the shower curtain. "I'm not entirely sure what part of _no fucking way_ isn't clear here, Quistis. I don't want anything to do with her, and I don't want her to have anything to do with us. She's not a part of this family."

He shuts off the faucet, and snatches a towel off of the rack.

"Sometimes," she says, so quietly that he isn't sure what she says at first, "I don't feel like part of this _family_ either."

She walks out of the bathroom, leaving him alone, dripping, and slams the bedroom door.

_xx_

He knocks, once, and opens the door. The bedroom is dark, save for the fading daylight that slips in between the curtains.

"I really don't want to talk to you right now," Quistis says.

"Whatever. I just need some damn pants. I'll be out of your hair in two seconds."

He dresses. Behind him, she moves on the bed, and there is a faint rustle of blankets. When he looks at her, she is curled up, a pillow held tightly in her arms. Fuck, he doesn't know how to _deal _with her like this.

"What'd you mean?" he says, finally.

She is silent.

"Because," he continues, yanking a shirt over his head. "I would do _anything _for you. Anything. For _you_. I took a goddamned _bullet_, just to keep you safe. I don't know why you would think that. Just —help me out here. Because I don't get it, Quistis."

He would _die_ for her, a thousand fucking times, and she's giving him shit about his _mother, _this woman who ruined his life before it even really started. He wonders when the hell they stopped understanding each other.

Did they _ever _even understand each other? Or are they just still together because of this kid?

He doesn't know anymore.

"I don't know," she says, and it pisses him off, how often she relies on that. "I just—I don't _know_ anymore, Seifer."

"About what? Us?"

She shrugs. Awesome.

"No. It's… she _loves_ you, more than she loves me. Like I'm her second choice, because you're always there, anyway."

It takes him a second to figure out what the hell she's talking about. "_Hana_?"

She nods. "I took her out this morning. I just wanted to get _coffee_, and it took three hours to get to the Roast and back because I had to keep stopping to console her. And I knew that if you'd have been there, she would've been quiet. She wouldn't have had a freaking _breakdown_. I can't do this, Seifer. I'm no good at it." She crumples the pillow tighter under her chin.

"Babe…" He's at a loss. Seifer draws his hands down his face, and exhales. "She loves you. You know that."

Quistis' pained laugh hurts so badly in his chest. "How come, then, she'll cry for twenty minutes if I touch her, and the second you pick her up, she's happy as a clam? How come you can sit there with her in your lap and get a million things done, and I can barely have two seconds to myself if you're not around?"

"She's just an _infant_."

"Yeah. But still."

He sits heavily on the edge of the bed. "I don't know what you want me to say."

"Don't say anything. It doesn't matter. I'll get over it."

As if on cue, Hana's cries come over the baby monitor.

Quistis unfolds herself from her little ball, and walks out of the room. He hears her murmuring—_shh, shh, it's okay_, _it's alright, just calm down._

But it is so very far from alright.


	2. to where the water was

**TWO. **

On a rainy Wednesday in May, she tells him she's leaving.

"Just for a few days," Quistis says, and he fishes around in the sink, recovering the plate he has dropped. "The Garden council invited me to speak at a conference in Esthar, to do a panel on blue magic."

"Oh," he says. "Okay."

She sighs—he's getting really tired of that noise—and finishes drying off a bowl, setting it into the cabinet neatly. "I don't have to go. I haven't agreed to anything yet. Squall asked; I'm the only one they know of who's even remotely qualified on the subject anymore."

"You should," he tells her. "Get out of town for a little bit. Relax."

_Get your priorities in order. _

"Are you sure?"

He passes her another plate. "Yeah, I'm sure."

"Alright, then," she says, and her face lightens, tension disappearing from around her eyes. She's _relieved_; she gets to escape, and he thinks he should feel something for her—happy, angry, annoyed, _something. _

He mostly finds he can't feel anything, and it doesn't really surprise him.

"Could you give me a ride to the ferry in the morning?" she asks. "I have to take the early boat to Balamb, and then we're going to catch a flight out of Garden."

"Okay."

He methodically scrubs at the bottom of a bottle, using his fingertips to work the dishcloth around the little creases.

"I'll call you when I land, alright?"

"Yeah, sure." He hands her the bottle. Their fingertips brush. He withdraws his hand and reaches into the sink to pull the stopper.

_xx_

It's almost like they're working off of reflexes, step one, step two, step three, she cries out, he utters an oath, and draws her into his arms, sweat beaded on his brow. They lay there for a while, a loose tangle of limbs, his hand resting on her stomach, his arms and legs liquid, his heart slowly regaining normal rhythm in his chest, her golden head heavy against his upper arm. They don't say anything.

He draws back some of her shining hair, letting it fall down into the space between them, and lays a line of soft kisses down her throat, inhaling the scent of her—clean soap and something cold, like she is forever summoning a blizzard spell.

Quistis traces the pattern of the scar in his elbow, and follows its spider-webbed edges out to where they vanish halfway down his forearm. She repeats the pattern in reverse, and then does it again.

"I want to fix this," she says finally. "When I get back. We're going to fix this."

He murmurs an affirmation into the curve of her shoulder. She traces the scar, again and again.

He falls asleep at some point, and it's the sound of soft crying over the monitor that wakes him up around two in the morning. He gets up, groggily.

When he glances into the nursery, Quistis is sitting there in the rocking chair, Hana in her arms, refusing the bottle in her mother's hand, making small cries that mean she's just bored, not hungry.

Seifer keeps his mouth shut.

Quistis murmurs things to their daughter—_good girl, you're such a good girl, you want to let me sleep, right? _But the cries persist.

She rocks, and rocks, and rocks.

Seifer withdraws.

_xx_

He drops her off at the port just shy of five in the morning, throwing the car in park before he gets out and pulls the one bag she has out of the trunk. Quistis leans inside the car, whispering a goodbye to Hana, who is only vaguely awake. The car _always _puts her to sleep. Quistis withdraws, and turns to him, hugging him tightly, pressing her face against his chest, and Seifer wraps his arms around her, resting his chin on the top of her head.

"I'll call," she reminds him. "As soon as I land."

Quistis lets go, and kisses him, once, softly. "I love you," she says, but her words are swallowed up by the deep boom of the ferry's horn.

"You, too," he says. It's not enough—it's never going to be enough, he's starting to realize. Love doesn't fix everything, no matter what all those movies and books and fairy tales say. "Bye."

She walks away, quickly, her bag slung over her shoulder and her suit jacket fluttering in the morning breeze.

_xx_

The Esthar convention center is a monolith of glass and steel, just as slick and space-age as everything else in this town. It's also absolutely _freezing. _She buttons her jacket and pages through her notes one more time.

The speech is an upgraded version of one she'd given at a similar conference in Galbadia four years ago, with some of the more cringe-worthy anecdotes taken out. Quistis draws a red line through another section, scribbles a note in the corner, and adds a comma, reminding herself to pause and take a breath.

"Are you going to take questions?" one of the coordinators asks her.

"If there's time, I could answer a few." The coordinator nods and moves off, going from speaker to speaker. The door to the meeting room slides open, and Squall enters, flanked by two imposing guards. It's hard to believe he's been out of the command game for nearly three years—he slips back into the role as if he'd never left, a soldier to his core.

She wonders, idly, what Rinoa says about all of this, about her husband dragged back from wherever he has escaped to, just to be thrown back into the fray.

But he is a war hero, and Garden will bend over _backwards_ to keep him, even if he persists in saying that his role as Balamb's commander is only temporary until a suitable replacement can be found.

Garden will always drag them back again. She is lucky to have gotten this far away, and yet here she is, sitting amongst a flock of SeeDs in their full dress uniforms, wearing a dark grey suit jacket and a knee-length skirt, her white blouse pressed to crisp perfection. She is a dove among the crows.

She knows they're looking at her, wondering why she's back among them. Her dishonorable discharge from Garden wasn't exactly a secret; her relationship with notorious war _criminal _Seifer Almasy doesn't help her once-gleaming reputation. She's gotten a dozen congratulations, though, and just as many raised eyebrows. However, if there is one thing Quistis Trepe is very, very good at, it's pretending she doesn't want slit the throat of at least half the people in this room.

Squall drops into a chair at her table.

"Hey, how'd it go?"

He shrugs. "Security can't find anything. This is getting exhausting."

She leans back in her chair. "Better safe than sorry." Better alive than dead, is what she really means. They lost one commander last year. Garden can't stand to lose a second; every threat called in is taken seriously, immediately.

"Yeah." Squall glances over at her notes. "Going well?"

She shrugs. "Well enough. I'm just hoping that half the audience isn't from the last conference I read this speech at, or I'm going to get rotten vegetables thrown at me."

"No raw produce allowed in the convention center," Squall says, drily enough that it takes her a second to realize it's a joke.

"That's a relief." Quistis reads over the last page of her speech, quickly. There's nothing else she can see that needs to be changed, not right now, anyway. "Do you know how much time we'll have for questions?"

Squall shrugs. "Dunno. I'm not answering any. You don't have to, either."

"Oh, good." The last thing she feels like doing is standing up on stage while potentially personal questions are thrown at her, no matter how many disclaimers she'll make that she won't answer them. She sighs. If only real life worked out that easily.

"You okay?" Squall asks, raising an eyebrow.

Quistis sits back in her seat and slips off her glasses, rubbing at her eyes. "Just—stressed out, I suppose. Seifer and I had a fight before I left."

"You want to talk about it?"

"Not… really. Edea showed up. In Dollet."

Squall nods.

"So, of course, Seifer just flips out, and I don't _blame _him, but at the same time, he could've just walked away and avoided a lot of stress for everyone. And I'm just so _tired_ that I- snapped at him."

_And told him that maybe I don't love him, and basically got pissed at him because I think my three-month-old daughter doesn't love me. _

She keeps this to herself. That's too big of a tangle of emotions to dive into right now.

"Ah."

"Sorry. I know I just said I didn't want to talk about it, and here I am, dumping my problems on you. Again."

He shrugs, his shoulders rising and falling. "I'll listen. It's fine."

He's relaxed, a lot, since the war, where before, no one could get Squall Leonhart to listen to anyone bitch about their personal problems without interjecting some sort of smartass remark—_go talk to a wall. _

Rinoa's had a big effect on him, no matter what Quistis may think of the other woman—maybe it's a little bit of jealously, that Rinoa was the only one to get him to come out of his shell that effectively. That Quistis had tried for _years_, and only succeeded in becoming his friend.

It doesn't matter. The band of silver on Squall's left ring finger means she wouldn't stand a chance in hell anyway, even if she wanted to.

And she doesn't really want to. That crush is dead and buried.

"You want to go outside for a minute?" Squall asks. "Get some air?"

"God, yes." She stacks up her notes and neatly arranges them in the folder, stuffing the whole thing into her bag, while Squall has a brief conversation with his security detail.

Her phone chimes as she and Squall walk out into the hallway, surrounded by his detail in a loose formation; she pauses, and he stops a few feet ahead of her, glancing back as she fishes her phone out of her bag.

_Hey, do you know if we've got any more wipes?_

_Check under the sink,_ she types back.

"Sorry," she tells Squall, resuming her pace.

"No worries."

There is a faint whistling in the air, an irritating noise. "What _is _that?" Quistis asks. "That sound?"

Squall glances up. "Maybe the air conditioning? I don't know."

The whistling gets louder as they go down the mostly empty hall—this wing is reserved for Garden, and the only other people around are men and women in uniform, working security. They salute Squall as he passes; he largely ignores them. It's all reflex, anyway.

"They should get that looked at," Quistis says. "It sounds like the building's going to take off."

One of his bodyguards opens the door and ushers Squall through, holding the door open for Quistis as well. She is all of three feet away from the door when her phone buzzes again.

_Found it. Good luck w/ your speech._

She is halfway through writing a reply when there is an awful roar, and something slams into her back. Her phone flies out of her hand, skittering down the hall. She stumbles, and turns to look-

"_Quistis_!" Squall is yelling her name.

The whole hallway is shaking, coming down in massive chunks of granite and chrome and glass. Quistis turns on her heel, and runs, charging down the hallway. Something hits her hard on the side of her head, a piece of ceiling or a shard of glass—she doesn't _know_.

Squall screams her name again, and she runs toward the sound—suddenly he has become little more than a smear of black dress uniform and dark hair. Quistis blinks, hard, but he does not resolve into a clear picture.

She can't _see_, why can't she _see? _

His fingers latch around her wrist, and he drags her into the stairwell, pulling her down the steps. There is the hot stickiness of blood pouring down the side of her head. She reaches up and presses her palm hard against the wound; hot blood coats her hand immediately.

"Go, _go!_" the guards scream in their ears. There is another blast, somewhere deep inside the building. The stairs shudder under their feet; Quistis slips, falls, and is yanked back up by one of the bodyguards. He practically carries her down the rest of the flight, until she regains her rhythm.

They run.

_xx_

With the absent precision of having done this about eighty thousand times in the past three months, Seifer finishes changing Hana's diaper and fixes the snaps on her onesie. The fresh box of baby wipes is stowed away somewhere under the changing table, where he can find it later.

There is no immediate response from Quistis, so he shoves his phone back into his pocket before the infant can grab it and stick it in her mouth, like she's done with everything else he owns. Seifer tries to distract her with some stuffed toy that he thinks might be a bear. It's impossible to tell them apart anymore—it's soft, it's hypoallergenic, and she's going to put it in her mouth in five seconds anyway. _Why _are they so expensive?

Hana shoves it away and starts to wail, for the fourth time in the last three hours. Not _again. _

He lifts her up off of the changing table. She doesn't abate.

"C'mon," he says, "it's okay."

But she keeps crying. He tries a book, one of those ridiculous ones where there are all of six words in it. No luck. She drops every toy he tries to present her with. Nothing. She's been fed and changed and has slept more in the past twelve hours than he's gotten in a week.

He attempts to put her in a bouncer seat. She's usually entertained by it for at _least _five minutes. Today, she is having noneof it, and if anything, her crying gets louder.

She refuses to let go when he tries to put her down in her crib, clinging tightly to his shirt like a monkey.

Fine. Whatever. It's not like this isn't the first time this has happened. She can't cry forever.

He shifts her, slightly, so he can get his phone out, and queues up a video chat with Quistis. Maybe that'll help. It can't _hurt _at this point, and he's out of ideas.

When he connects, he gets a _Not In Service_ error.

Huh.

He tries again. Same thing.

_Not In Service. _

Weird. She's probably turned her phone off—he doesn't know when the hell she's supposed to be speaking.

"Guess your mom's a no go," he tells Hana. She doesn't care, just keeps on crying like he hasn't said anything at all.

There are a ton of awful, jingly kids' songs queued up in his music library, all Quistis' doing. He picks one at random, thumbing the Play icon.

_Itsy bitsy spider—_

Ugh.

Forty minutes later, she whimpers herself into sleep on his shoulder as he sprawls out into the rocking chair. The clock is ticking over to seven. He shifts, gingerly. She doesn't move.

Okay. Easy does it.

Seifer gets up out of the chair, carefully, so, so carefully.

No noise.

He sets her down in the crib. She sleeps.

Thank _god_.

He heads for the door, and the second his hand touches the knob, his phone starts buzzing, a loud vibration that might as well be an earthquake in the silence of the nursery. He yanks it out of his pocket and answers as he slips out of the room, shutting the door silently behind him.

"What?" he answers. It's rude as hell. If they've got a problem, they can bite him.

_xx_

Seifer Almasy storms the gates of Balamb Garden with a haphazardly packed duffel bag slung across his body and Hana in a baby carrier. He gets a lot of weird looks. He doesn't _care. _

The airstrip behind Garden is a relatively recent addition, once Squall dropped the Ragnarok down in Garden's backyard and they had nowhere to really keep it. There is a sleek, small plane waiting, illuminated by the huge halogen lamps that line the airstrip. The SeeD logo painted on its side is lit in sharp relief.

Seifer hands over his bag to the cadet who's loading the cargo hold. When he boards, the plane is nearly empty, just three other figures—a SeeD whose name he doesn't know and who looks like he's going to piss his pants once he sees Seifer, Zell Dincht, still looking like an asshole with that dumb tattoo on his face, and Rinoa Heartilly.

He ignores Dincht, and sits in the empty seat next to Rinoa. Hana's carrier goes in the aisle seat.

Rinoa looks up at him, and her eyes are wide, terrified. Her fingers have a death-grip on the armrest between them.

He doesn't know what to say to her, this girl whom he might've loved once, back when everything was new.

"Dude, is that a _baby_?" Dincht says abruptly, leaning across the aisle.

"No, you idiot, it's a rocket launcher." His patience for Zell Dincht has always been thin, at best. He hates the fact that the younger man has always tried to be the bigger person, that he _forgives_ Seifer for all the shit that he's done, like it's some kind, benevolent act of goodwill toward all mankind.

"Why the hell do you have a _kid_?"

"You see, Dincht, when you have sex with a woman, sometimes that shit happens. But since you haven't gotten that far yet—"

"You know what, _fuck _you—"

"Not my type, but thanks for the offer."

"Shut up," Rinoa says, and her voice is sharp and loud, ringing with command.

They both look at her. She stares back at both of them, levelly, her eyes red rimmed. There is an abrupt coolness in the air, like she is summoning something.

Zell huffs, "Whatever, you're not even worth my time, man," and flops back in his seat. Seifer refrains from reaching across the aisle and punching Dincht in the throat. The plane starts to taxi down the runway.

As they are taking off, Rinoa's fingers clench around Seifer's. He looks down at her.

"Please don't let him be dead," she whispers, and he can't tell if she's talking to him, or if she's just praying out loud.

_Please. _

He watches the lights of Balamb drop away as they ascend into the twilit sky.

_xx_

_-did you ever know_

_I had mine on you—_

Singing is what wakes him a couple of hours later, pulling him out of a dense sleep.

Rinoa has Hana in her arms, singing softly; the child's hands reach happily for Rinoa's face. The tune is vaguely familiar. He can't place it.

Seifer yawns, hugely, and stretches, feeling things pop and pull in his back that probably aren't supposed to do that.

Rinoa stops singing.

"Sorry," she says quietly. "She started crying, and you looked like you needed the sleep."

He shrugs. "It's fine. Thanks."

"She's a good girl."

"Yeah." Outside the half-drawn shade, it is pitch. "Where are we?"

"Thirty minutes away."

The math reveals that he's gotten at least two hours of sleep. He doesn't remember dozing off. This is getting to be a bad habit.

Rinoa tickles Hana's chest, who laughs in response. "She looks so much like Quistis."

"Mm." He doesn't really want to talk about that, thanks. He _knows_ how much she looks like Quistis; he doesn't want to be reminded of the fact that perhaps, Hana is all that's left of _Quistis. _

"How old is she?"

"Three months." He watches her, how she handles his daughter, how Hana responds so positively. "She doesn't usually like strangers. You're good with her."

"I've always liked children," Rinoa says, her eyes focused on the baby's face. Her voice is wistful.

"You and Leonhart never-?" Not that he _wants_ to know.

"I can't. Because of the sorceress gene."

He doesn't know what to do with this admission. "Oh," he says. It seems like a safe enough response.

"You surprise me," Rinoa says. "I didn't think you'd be the first one to start a family, to settle down."

"It was kind of an accident," Seifer says. "Not really my original game plan." Because of _Garden's_ fuck-up, one letter lost in the mail when they could've just emailed it, Quistis got pregnant, because they were stupid and _careless_ and-

"Oh," she echoes. "I see."

Seifer shrugs. It doesn't matter. Time marches inexorably onward, and he's adapted.

"She has your eyes."

"Yeah." He reaches out and smoothes back a curl of hair. "She needs a haircut."

"I think it's sweet."

He snorts, a little. "You would. You think everything's adorable."

"Everything's beautiful if you look at it the right way." Hana gets hold of her finger, and Rinoa smiles, gently, softly.

Another time, another place—_that _summer, when he was fiercely seventeen and she was the prettiest girl he'd ever laid eyes on. Seifer remembers her casual flirtation—_buy me a drink, soldier?_

She was the first girl who had ever left him tongue-tied and breathless and almost afraid to kiss her.

But that's another place, another time.

"Attention, we're entering Estharian airspace. Please fasten your seatbelts and secure all loose belongings. We'll be landing in ten minutes."

Rinoa sighs, and hands him the child. Hana gurgles at him, and flails in protest when he puts her back into the carrier, buckling the complicated straps. She settles after a moment, though; he keeps his hand dangling over the edge. She grabs at his fingers, again and again.

There is a flash of bright white light outside the window; Esthar's cloaking field retracts, and the plane begins to descend.


	3. that's what the water gave me

**THREE. **

-screaming of sirens in the distance.

Quistis is trapped in darkness. She pushes, hard, and what was pinning her to the ground falls away with a soft thud. It is a body in a Esthar Garden uniform. One of Squall's guards. She can't make out his face; her vision spots and darkens. She blinks hard, and rubs at her eyes. The spotting abates for a minute. She keeps blinking, trying to wet her eyes.

It's not effective, but it will have to be enough.

She coughs—chokes, more aptly. Dust is everywhere. Quistis reaches out for the man's pulse, fumbling with shaking fingers until she lands on the right spot. There is nothing. He is dead.

Dead saving her life. It is not the first time a SeeD has died for her. She feels numb; is this shock? Is she supposed to remember if she's supposed to be in shock?

Somehow, Quistis doesn't think so.

"Squall," she says, and the word comes out thick, her tongue a dumb, awkward muscle in her mouth. She coughs again, spits away a mouthful of something—she does not look to see if it is red—and tries again, a little louder. "Squall."

There is a groan, somewhere to her left. Quistis eases to her feet, stumbles over a block of something, and catches herself on it. The narrow stairwell is spinning, and then it snaps back to the right in abrupt clarity that fades around the edges immediately.

She does not dwell on how much blood she's probably lost. When she touches her head, there is a dried mass of it in her hair. Her fingers are sticky. At least it's stopped, mostly. _Head wounds bleed a lot_, she reminds herself, and leans forward against the rubble that has stopped her, waiting for a spike of dizziness to abate.

There is a strangled scream, a man's voice. She looks down. Squall's face is pale against the rubble he lays in. The block she is leaning against is covering his legs. She backs off immediately.

"Help," he gasps. Quistis reaches, digging her fingers under the edge of the huge hunk of concrete. Squall helps her as best he can; it is not much. Together, they _shove_. The rock moves away.

There is a rumbling, and a cloud of dust and small debris falls on them from somewhere high above, pelting her back.

"We have to get out of here," she tells him.

Both of them look down at his leg. There is a shiny white shard of bone sticking out through his uniform pants. Squall looks like he's going to pass out. He can't walk like this. They're trapped.

"Squall," she says. "Are you junctioned?" She needs a cure spell. He shakes his head stiffly. _Shit. _It's not his fault. This isn't a battle mission. He shouldn't have to be junctioned to give a _speech_.

Squall's eyes are tightly shut. "Do it," he hisses. He knows the field medicine procedures as well as she.

Quistis kneels, and fumbles in her jacket pocket. Her glasses are, miraculously, largely undamaged, save for one spidery crack across the top half of her right lens; she puts them on. It brings everything just a tiny bit more in focus.

It'll have to be enough.

"Ready?" she asks.

"No," he tells her, and the cry he makes when she shoves the bone back into place is inhuman. His body arches back off of the floor. He is shaking, his eyes shut tightly.

She can just make out the numbered sign on the wall. Two. One more flight. That's it. They can do it.

There is another rumble. She doesn't think about it.

Squall's hand drops away. His face is ashen. The cure spell fades.

Quistis shrugs out of her jacket and knots it tightly around his leg, tying the sleeves together. Red stains bloom on the dove-colored fabric, but it is all she can do.

She lifts him, straining, and the heel of her shoe snaps. She is thrown off balance, and then kicks it off. She ditches the other one, as well. The ground is cold and hard under her stocking feet.

She slings Squall's arm around her shoulder, taking the bulk of his weight. "One flight," she tells him. "That's it."

Her vision is starting to get worse. She reaches out with one hand and finds the railing, wrapping her fingers around it.

"Hold on," Squall says. His phone works, barely; she has no idea where hers is. Long gone, probably, blown to smithereens. He dials someone, and swears. "No signal."

They are alone.

The screen makes an effective flashlight—he holds it up in front of them, occasionally tapping the screen to keep it lit. They pick their way through the rubble on the landing. They find the body of his other guard, also dead, his chest caved in by what looks like an entire step.

The stairs are relatively clear; she has to skip a step at one point to get over a huge piece of twisted metal that she stands no chance of moving. Together, at the speed of approximately molasses, they make their way down to the dim green glow of the emergency exit sign.

Quistis pushes at the door, hard, throwing her whole weight against it, and it doesn't open. There is the faint whine of an alarm. This isn't supposed to be locked. It's an _emergency exit_, for crying out loud. And if this doesn't qualify as an emergency, she doesn't know what does, anymore.

Squall strains against the door with her; it still doesn't move. He has to stop, gasping for air, one hand grasping at his thigh, his face gray with pain.

The hall is something out of a horror movie, erratically blinking lights that cast everything in crazy shadow or intense relief. There are corpses everywhere she looks.

"Shit," she says.

"Agreed," Squall gasps. She doesn't know how much longer she can carry him. "Front door's to the left."

So that is the way they go.

They squeeze around ruined display cases, walk carefully through a field of shattered glass—it bites into her feet. She leaves a trail of bloody footprints. She takes the pain and folds it up and seals it somewhere far away. She's had worse.

Her vision blurs out, and there is a horrifying ten seconds in which she cannot see at all.

"Quistis?"

"My eyes," she tells him. "I can't—" She squeezes them shut, and opens them. Her sight is back, just barely. It has to be all this dust. That's it. Just the dust. "Okay," she says. "Let's go."

The hallway shudders. Things fall, huge chunks of ceiling. She shoves Squall against the wall, pulling him out of the path of a piece of air duct that comes crashing down. The entire building gives off a great scream of metal.

It's going to come down on them at any minute.

_xx_

They've been in Esthar for exactly an hour, gathered in the presidential palace, where SeeD has established a temporary communications headquarters. A private car had whisked them from the airport to the palace; Laguna Loire himself greeted them.

Rinoa had gone straight to her father-in-law and buried her head in his chest, sobbing.

Seifer is sitting in an empty room near the presidential palace's kitchen, taking advantage of the quiet to feed Hana. Someone has left the television on, playing the news. It is a continual update of _nothing. _The convention center is still not secure enough to send anyone in. The survivor count ticks up in the corner, one digit at a time. They are at twelve.

None of them is Quistis Trepe.

There is a presence behind him.

"I'm sorry," Edea says. "I didn't mean to startle you."

Of _course _she's here. Cid's here, talking to Laguna Loire, reassuring him that everything will be alright, that they will not pull the corpse of Squall Leonhart from the wreckage. His weak, feeble father is in no such position to make those promises, but Cid persists.

(Like he'd promised that Seifer would be the greatest knight that ever lived. Not the biggest failure Garden had ever seen.)

And if Cid's here, Edea is here. A sorceress goes nowhere without her knight.

Every single nerve ending in his body is screaming for him to get up and run. He sits. Hana feeds. Edea is a shark, circling the small table. She sits. He ignores her.

"She's beautiful," Edea whispers.

He ignores her.

"Seifer… Quistis is going to be fine."

"I'm not worried," he says wearily. He just wants her to _go away_. "And it's none of your business, anyway, if I were."

"Seifer—"

"Just… _stop_, okay? Stop trying to guilt me into forgiving you, or whatever bullshit you're trying to pull, alright? Because it's not going to fucking happen."

When she looks at him, she is so old, and so _frail_, and her dark eyes are sorrowful. How the hell had he ever been afraid of her, how the _hell_ had she ever drawn him under her spell, and made him slaughter and burn and bomb—

_Because you would do anything for your mother. _

But this woman across from him is a stranger, with a bowed head and fragile limbs and black hair starting to streak with gray.

She folds her hands in front of her on the table. "I don't expect you to forgive me. I… remember, sometimes, snatches of what Ultimecia made me do. I remember—I'm so _sorry_, Seifer. I'm so, so sorry for how badly I hurt you, for everything I—_made_ you do. I just wanted the chance to say that to you. That's all."

Fuck, she's crying in front of him, tears streaking down her lined face, and the little boy that just wanted to _protect_ his mother protests this sight. But the man he has become takes the little boy and leads him away and locks him up somewhere deep down inside, where he cannot get out, because her tears do not change a fucking thing. She still betrayed him, cast him down into hell and left him there to rot until he clawed his way out with his own two hands. Where his new life is _constantly_ obscured in her shadow, where he is judged and hated and feared because of a puppet-master in a mantle of feathers and a crown of horns.

Hana fusses. Automatically, he sets aside the bottle and brings her up to his shoulder. She turns her head into his neck and her breath is warm.

Edea watches him, her eyes following his every move, and he knows she wants to say something, to beg to be let back into his life, to be given a second chance. But Seifer doesn't forgive that easily.

He owes Edea Kramer exactly _shit_.

So, why, then, does he open his mouth, and say, "Do you want to-?" What misguided _weak_ shit is this, spewing forth from his lips without his damn _permission_?

"Really?" Her face lights up like the sun.

When she lifts Hana from his hands, it is like she tears away a piece of him, and it takes all of his highly-trained reflexes not to rip his daughter out of Edea's grip. But Edea is gentle, careful, holding her head exactly right, her hand along the curve of Hana's back. She is not a stranger to this.

"Thank you," she whispers. He doesn't know what to say.

This isn't forgiveness. This is, at best, the twig of an olive branch. This is, Seifer Almasy realizes, because he is just _tired_ of fighting, tired of being so fucking angry, tired of the overwhelming thought that Quistis is _dead_, that he's never going to see her again, just… tired. Of everything. Of all of this shit.

"Seifer!"

Rinoa's voice interrupts them, and she appears in the doorway of the kitchen. He swallows hard against the knot of terror that crawls up into his throat, because her face is still frantic, wide-eyed and—

"Go," Edea tells him, her eyes fixed on his child's face. "I'll be right here."

-he goes.

_xx_

"Run," Squall yells into her ear, and their attempt at it is laughable at best; she half-drags him around the bend and there is the _door_, the sweetest sight she's ever seen. There are voices. She can _hear_ them.

"Help!" she yells. "_Help us!_"

There is no answer. She drags her former commander through the shattered remnants of the atrium doors. Glass carves at her arms, ripping through the sleeves of her blouse. She doesn't care. It's just a shirt.

Hana's face flashes in her mind—her daughter's bright smile, her brilliant green eyes, and Quistis Trepe is not going to _die _in here, like some failure, with regret heavy in her heart and foul words the last things said to the ones she loves on her lips. She pushes on.

There is the protesting whine of metal in the air. The building buckles as they hobble out into the cool night air.

Esthar's neon skyline is before them, and there is an army of emergency vehicles across the street, lights and sirens flashing. The brightness is an assault on her eyes, leaving her seeing only streaks of white.

"Come _on_," Squall says, propelling her forward into the solar flare of lights, and they run.

_xx_

Laguna's driver breaks every single speed limit that Esthar has ever established.

_xx_

Someone is yelling for her, a man's voice breaking through the din of the emergency room.

She holds the oxygen mask to her face and breathes in, breathes out, focusing on the air supply. She coughs, hard, ripping away the mask to gag over the edge of the gurney. She spits up something onto the floor. The mask goes back on over her face.

"_Quistis_!"

Inhale, exhale.

That voice is familiar. She opens her eyes to slits; the fluorescent brightness is too much to bear.

Her name is yelled again, and she raises her hand up briefly, giving a limp wave before letting her arm fall. She hears him swear and shove his way through people, and she is swept off of the gurney into his arms.

Her fingers hold fast to the back of his shirt; he smells like _Seifer_, not like burning corpses, not like dust-choked air, not ruin and decay. They cling to each other, desperately, and there is a long, hollow shudder running through his chest, and if the rock that had slammed into her skull had been hit her any _harder, _she would have been _dead_, and she'd left him angry and upset and pissed off and—

Crying burns her eyes, acid agony. She can't stop.

"Sir, put her _down_, she's had a head trauma—you can't just move her like that."

Seifer mutters, _fuck off_, in the curve of her shoulder, and it makes her laugh, so hard that she starts coughing again, and he _has _to let her go so she doesn't choke.

She inhales more oxygen. Exhales.

Someone asks her how she feels. She says, "Dizzy." Seifer's hand is on her shoulder, warm and large and reassuring.

They make her lie down on the gurney, and wheel her away.

_xx_

There are many things that Squall Leonhart would rather never do again, and having to have his leg reset by a team of surgeons is very high at the top of the list, no matter how many drugs they pump through him before they do it. He is half-in, half-out, drifting on a tidal wave of the most potent curaga-morphine cocktail he has ever had, when his father and his wife walk into the room.

Rinoa comes straight to him, stopping at his bedside as she takes in the damage. He leans in to her touch, her fingers feather light against his forehead. "I was so scared," she whispers.

"I'm sorry," he tells her softly.

She presses a kiss against his lips, and he _feels _her terror, sliding around underneath her skin, tampered down by the Odine bangle she wears around her ankle, reworked to be little more than a thin, shining cord. "What happened?"

He's too fuzzy on the details. There are too many mixes of potions and cure spells running through his veins right now for him to even _want _to think about the details. He is alive. That's more than he can say for a hundred other people. He settles for a vague shrug.

Laguna steps to the other side of the bed. He looks like hell, like he's aged five years in the past… however many hours it's been. "The news says you saved Quistis' life."

Squall snorts. "Saved mine." Of course they would get it wrong. He's the commander, he's the _hero._ She is the wash-out SeeD who hooked up with the villain of the story, no matter how many times he's corrected the press statements.

"I thought so," Laguna says. "How's the leg?"

"Bad." A few pins, a metal plate fusing the break together. It will be months before he is back on his feet, and that's provided the torn muscles even heal the way they're supposed to.

"It doesn't look that bad," Laguna says gamely, eyeing the elaborate sling holding his son's right leg firmly in place. "You'll be up on your feet in no time."

"Sure," he tells his father. "No time."

There isn't much he can do about it now. Cid will have to find a new commander—for what good is an active-duty SeeD with one working leg?


	4. and time goes quicker between us

**FOUR. **

The banging goes on around her head, and Quistis Trepe keeps her eyes closed, her arms at her sides.

_Two minutes_, a voice tells her. _Are you doing alright?_

"Okay," she says. Her voice has disintegrated into a rough whisper, from all the smoke and things she doesn't want to think about now riding around in her lungs. She'll be lucky if she gets out if this without cancer or something.

The MRI tech resumes the soft classical music that they've been piping in for the last twenty minutes. It's incongruous with the hammering that the machine itself makes as they scan her brain.

_Just to be on the safe side_, the neurologist told her. Because she's lost so much blood. Because she hit her head spectacularly hard.

Because she told him that she was having trouble seeing.

She should've told them that the second they got her into the ER. It apparently gets you taken care of a lot faster, even in this massive crisis. As soon as she said she was dizzy, bam, into the MRI booth she was shoved.

_Stay still_, the disembodied voice tells her. Her fingers cease drumming against her leg, a motion she wasn't even aware that she was making.

"Sorry," Quistis rasps.

It's too _small _in here. She can't breathe. She needs to get out. Twenty minutes is nineteen minutes too long for this torture, especially after the confines of the destroyed stairwell, where she thought maybe she was going to die.

_Okay,_ they tell her. _That's it. Hold tight. You be out of there in a second. _

Slowly, so, so slowly, the machine ejects her into a cool, dim room, a blessed relief. She opens her eyes, and someone helps her sit up. The dizziness is still there. She sits with her head hanging for a second until it passes. The last thing she wants to do is throw up. She thinks she might, anyway.

When she looks up, Seifer is standing on the other side of the glass, his arms crossed, watching her. His face drifts in and out of focus, and then finally settles, in slightly blurred relief.

It isn't enough, this out of focus variant of him. His brow is furrowed. She is getting really tired of him having to see her like this; she's not some _damsel_, she isn't supposed to be continually in distress. Quistis Trepe has never needed anyone to rescue her.

Yet time and time again, she brushes by death in his presence. It's not fair to him, to either of them. They just need to move to a private island somewhere, where the whole world leaves them the hell alone.

"Okay," the neurologist says, walking into the room as Quistis is being helped down into a wheelchair. "There's some swelling right here, near the occipital lobe. We're going to keep you here for a while to make sure that goes down without having to go in and relieve the pressure manually. Now, the occipital lobe handles all of your visual functions, which explains why you're not able to see clearly right now."

"But it's fixable?"

"It's hard to say. The swelling will reduce, and that _should_ take care of a lot of what you're experiencing. But there's no way to tell if your vision's going to come back to what it was before."

She flattens her palms against her thighs, feeling the ruined fabric of her skirt. She will have to throw away most of her outfit, tattered and torn and blood-streaked. She doesn't know what has happened to her jacket. She doesn't care. She needs a shower. She feels disgusting.

She just wants to go _home. _

"I'm sorry," she interrupts. "But I have an infant. I can't just be… _stuck _here!"

"Miss Trepe, it's—"

"No," she says, cutting him off. "It's not okay. I can't just put my entire life on hold—"

"I'm sorry," the doctor repeats. "It's really wait-and-see at this point."

His choice of words makes her want to punch him. Quistis exhales.

"Any other questions?"

She shakes her head, briefly; it makes the spots flare up in her eyes and she does not see him go. The nurse wheels her out into the hall, where they take her to a private room. Quistis is allowed a shower, sitting on a stool in the narrow stall and rinsing out her hair as best she can. The water stings the small line of stitches at the back of her skull. The amount of gray dust that makes its way down the drain is alarming.

She towel dries as quickly as her aching limbs will let her; she doesn't bother looking in the mirror. She doesn't want to see another battered variant of herself.

She walks to the bed under her own power, refusing the nurse's offer of assistance. They can catch her if she falls, but she's not going to have her hand held to walk five feet. The older woman hooks her up to a million different machines that Quistis doesn't need or want, sticking electrodes to her heart, her forehead, the back of her neck.

They start an IV line, filled with something that makes the paint practically spider up the walls, easing the ache in her bones almost immediately. The nurse dims the lights in the room, and spends a few minutes talking to Seifer, but the drugs are already dragging Quistis down into sleep; she hears none of their brief conversation.

She wakes up hours later to a child's soft gurgling and Seifer's low rumble in response. When she opens her eyes, everything is dark; she has a moment of panic until she realizes that the lights are turned down low.

She turns her head in the direction of Seifer's voice. He is pacing near the window, murmuring things to their daughter. The moon casts his face in shadow.

She's lost an entire day. Great.

Quistis coughs.

Seifer stops whispering, and looks over at her.

She coughs again, harder, and fumbles for the glass of water the nurse had left near her bedside. Her fingers brush it, and it falls, crashing against the floor.

"_Shit_." The coughing leaves her throat aching, feeling like her lungs are trying to escape out of her chest.

"What?" he asks.

"Water," she works out. "Dropped the—" She coughs again, violently. "_Dammit_!" she exclaims.

Seifer leans down and picks up the cup. Hana makes nervous sounds at the unexpected motion. "You want me to get someone?"

"No."

He disappears into the bathroom. There is the sound of the faucet, and then it shuts off. He returns and hands her the plastic cup.

She drinks, draining it, and leans her head back against the wall, forgetting about the damn _contusion_ until there is a thrum of agony where delicate flesh meets hard surface.

She asks him to turn up the lights, just a little bit. He obliges her; things regain color and texture, shadows melting away.

Both of their eyes are on her—Seifer's concerned gaze and Hana's sleepy-eyed stare, identical shades of green watching her every movement. The spotting has abated, for the moment—maybe sleep was the cure. Maybe she's fine. But everything is fuzzy around the edges, and she knows that it is never that easy.

It's like before she had her laser surgery all over again, when without her glasses she was nearly blind. It wasn't until she was seventeen, spending hours upon hours on the computer studying for her Instructor license that she even needed _reading_ glasses.

She can't go through that again. She won't. There has to be something they can do.

She can't just sit and wait and hope she's not going to wake up in utter darkness one morning.

Hana fusses. Quistis holds out her hands.

"Here, give her to me."

"You sure?"

This is her _child _that Quistis is asking for, not a spare pillow. "Yes, I'm sure."

He hands her over.

"Hi, sweetheart," she whispers, drawing her daughter to her. Hana stares at her, her eyes bright and wide, and Quistis is rewarded with a startled smile when she tickles her daughter's chest.

When did she get so _heavy_? How has this happened? She's only been gone a couple of days.

Hana grabs the front of the purple scrubs top, gripping the fabric in her hand. She turns her head away from Quistis, like she is looking for her father.

"Does she have a bottle?" Quistis asks. He nods, and digs one out of the bag. She shakes it, one of those premixed ones that saved their sanity on multiple occasions. Hana accepts it reluctantly, uncomfortable in this new environment. Her fingers stay tight in Quistis' shirt.

She studies her daughter for a very long time, trying to memorize every last curve and plane and curl, every tiny finger and toe, blinking hard against the blurriness threaten to take away the picture before she is done. This is not happening. This is not happening.

_xx_

This isn't _happening. _

He wants to hit something. Someone. This is Garden's fault. He wants to find Squall Leonhart and beat the shit out of him for trying to drag her back into the fray, where a fucking _conference_ nearly gets her killed and might leave her blind.

It all comes back down to Garden, to the unbreakable hold that it will _always _have over their lives. He wonders how many goddamned brochures will show up in their mailbox one day, trying to entice his daughter to join their ranks.

Seifer resists the urge to punch a hole in the wall. "You okay if I go for a walk?" _You won't go blind or drop her or-_

Quistis nods. "Fine. Could you bring the bag over here?"

He does, and he leaves her, taking the stairs down to the first floor and going out a side exit. Outside, it is a cool, quiet night, and he spies Laguna Loire standing off to the side, near a trash can, smoking a cigarette. For a wonder, the media has left the president alone, or maybe they just can't find him in his very clever hiding place.

Laguna exhales a cloud of smoke.

Sometimes, Seifer forgets that even movie stars age. Laguna looks old. Tired.

"You got an extra one?" he asks. He's never been much for the habit—once in a while in bars when he was younger, but right now, it seems appropriate.

Laguna—the _president, _Seifer reminds himself- pulls the pack out of his pocket. "Sure."

"Thanks." He takes one and the proffered lighter, lighting up and drawing a mouthful of smoke into his lungs. It eases some of the tightness in his chest. He remembers why he quit.

"How's she doing?"

Seifer shrugs. "Okay. How's Leonhart?"

Laguna taps some ash off of the end of his cigarette. "Beat up pretty badly. He says Quistis saved his life."

"Tch. She would do that." She always had to be the right one, the _strong _one. And now… now it's so much different. The cracks are showing in her careful façade, leaving an unsure, unsettled woman in place of the confident soldier.

Laguna smiles with the edge of his mouth. "They're both lucky."

"Yeah." Seifer watches the ash burn down on the end of his cigarette. Now that he has it, he doesn't want it. It feels like a waste, but it gives him something to do with his hands for a minute. A woman in scrubs walks by and gives them a dirty look. Seifer glares back.

"She's a brave woman. Squall talks about her occasionally. Can't believe that Garden just up and threw her out."

What the hell is Loire trying to do? Make him jealous? Anything between Quistis and Leonhart is deader than Garden's former commander.

"Yeah, well," he says, "Garden isn't known for having the most stellar track record for good decisions." _Like making Puberty Boy commander of everything and then being surprised when he ran off two years later. _

Laguna is silent. Maybe Seifer's offended him. Oh, well. Wouldn't be the first time he's offended someone famous.

"Squall wanted her to command Esthar Garden, did you know that? Back when it was first being built, like… five years ago. She was his first pick. She turned him down, though. Said she'd rather be an Instructor at Balamb."

No, he did _not _fucking know that. Not that it matters. It's not his business; it's ancient history.

"Must've pissed off Leonhart when she turned him down."

"Nah. Squall understood."

"Why the hell are you telling me this?"

"I don't know," Laguna chuckles, just a little, and it's not a happy sound. "Maybe just to remind myself that there are, occasionally, good people in the world. Because I'm having a lot of trouble with that right now." The president finishes his cigarette. "You want another one?"

Seifer shakes his head. He flicks off an inch of burnt ash and grinds his out in the metal tray on top of the trashcan. Loire leaves him, trailed by what looks like half an army of security. But Seifer supposes that's not unusual, when someone puts the president's son in the hospital. Leonhart's room is probably more secure than Garden has _ever _been right now.

He doesn't want to fucking think about Leonhart right now.

Seifer looks at the plume of smoke still flowing from the wreckage of Esthar's convention center, the only thing visible over the rest of the city skyline. He doesn't know how long he looks at it, tracking the smoke into the sky, before he turns his back on the whole scene and He stops in the lobby restroom long enough to scrub the stink of cigarettes off of his fingers and splashes a palmful of cold water on his face. It doesn't do much.

_xx_

His sister walks into the room already crying, and her greeting is that she slugs him _hard_ in the shoulder.

"Ow."

"You _jerk_," Ellone tells him. "You could have _died_!"

He shrugs. "I hadn't exactly planned on getting blown up."

Ellone bumps her knuckles against his shoulder again, gently, this time. "Then you're not just a jerk, you're an idiot."

"An alive idiot," he says dryly. It gets a smile out of her.

"Yeah, well, I'm missing a very important talk in Galbadia right now because of you." Ellone snatches a tissue out of the box by his bed and wipes her eyes.

Squall snorts. "I'll write you a note."

She doesn't ask him the obvious question—_how's the leg_, which Squall Leonhart is sick unto death of answering—and for that he is grateful. Ellone sits primly in the chair that Rinoa has recently vacated, when he sent her off back to the palace to get some real sleep, since he obviously wasn't going anywhere for a while.

"Aren't visiting hours over?" he asks after a minute, when it's clear she isn't going to talk.

"Laguna had some words with the night nurse. You should have seen him; he practically charmed the scrubs right off of her."

Squall rolls his eyes. "Didn't need that image, thanks."

"You're welcome." She reaches out and touches the petals of some flower he can't identify. "You've gotten a lot of flowers."

Also obvious, but he'll let it slide. "Take some of them. I don't want them."

"I couldn't. What would your admirers think?"

"_Please_ take them."

"They must have you on something pretty awesome, if you're voluntarily using the word, 'please'," Ellone comments, blowing her nose in the tissue. "We should see if we can sneak some out for you."

He laughs.

"Ah, so you agree." Her eyes skate over the brace holding up his leg, and he catches a flicker of worry across her face, skating over her red-rimmed eyes. He wonders how long she's been crying over him, and he feels impossibly guilty.

"Hey," Squall says. "I'm fine, okay?"

"I know. I was just—Laguna called me, and I didn't believe him at first. I mean. Terrorism, in Esthar? It doesn't _happen_. And then he started crying and— I was so _scared_, that I'd come here and you'd be dead and that would be it. No more little brother."

"Well," he says, awkwardly. "I'm still here."

Ellone sighs, again. "Yeah, but what about the next time? What then? You got out of being commander because you wanted to have a normal life. Why go back to it?"

"Garden needed me."

"Garden can find someone else to do their dirty work. You don't owe them this, Squall."

He doesn't know how to explain it to her—Garden is his _life_, his entire history. She, and his father, and Rinoa, are all so recent; Garden has raised him from a scared little twelve-year-old boy into the person he sees in the mirror in the morning. He can't turn his back on it; if they need him, he knows—he has always known—that he will come back.

Squall picks a piece of lint off of the black brace around his leg. "It's just a temporary command," he tells his sister. "You know that. And it's not like anyone could've predicted this."

"Still," Ellone says. "It's not fair."

He can't argue with her. He doesn't.


	5. oh, my love, don't forsake me

**FIVE. **

-she isn't aware she has said anything out loud until Squall looks at her sharply.

"You okay?" he asks.

She doesn't know. Rinoa presses her hand against her heart, feeling the racing beat, and fumbles behind her for a chair. One of the SeeDs standing near Squall's bed helps her into it, and she waves them away.

"I'm fine," she gasps. "Fine. Just—"

"What?" Squall demands.

She doesn't _know_. It feels like something has reached its hand right between her ribcage, wrapped its long, inky fingers around the source of all of her magic, and _squeezed_.

"Something—I'm okay," she says, as a nurse comes in, crouching in front of her to check her vitals. "I swear. I was just a little dizzy for a second."

"Are you sure?" the nurse asks, timing Rinoa's pulse. "Your heart rate's pretty high."

"I'm sure," Rinoa says. "I'm sure."

Something has gone horribly wrong, somewhere, and Rinoa has no idea what it could possibly mean. Around her ankle, the Odine metal is hot against her skin. She reaches down. When her fingers touch it, she feels nothing.

The nurse presses a stethoscope to her chest; Rinoa breathes deeply three times, per instruction. Her pulse calms. Squall makes the executive decision to postpone this meeting until the morning. She tells him he doesn't have to.

"Out," he orders, and the Garden contingent goes. They are left alone.

_The susurrus of wings beating in her ear, the whisper of a witch's voice. _

But that is in the _past_, none of that is relevant now.

Once the door is shut, Squall waits for her to speak.

"I feel something. Here." She touches just below her breastbone. "Like—fingers, digging inside my skin. Trying to— I don't know what. Grabbing for something. And for a second, it was like they'd gotten their grip on my magic, and were trying to pull it out."

Squall is silent, so serious even with all the drugs pumping through his veins, capable of running the largest military organization while high on painkillers, and here he is, listening to her ramble about _feelings_, incoherent, inexplicable ones.

But this is what their life has become, even if it's not what she had hoped for.

His unspoken question is one word. _Ultimecia._

"No," she says. "I don't think so."

Through the thin fabric of her blouse, her fingertips feel icy cold. Rinoa flattens her hand over her heart; thum_-thump, _thum-_thump. _

_xx_

She has exactly three hours and twenty-seven minutes with her granddaughter, this quiet, serious child who should not be such a stranger. When she searches for a toy in the black bag that Seifer has left behind, she comes across a card with emergency information. _Hana Rue_, the name reads in careful print. A most beloved sorrow.

The child stares at her from Edea's lap, eyes wide and solemn.

There are a few small single-serve bottles of ready-drink formula that make Edea cringe. This child should be feeding at her mother's breast, to grow up healthy and strong, not left drinking this artificial… _stuff. _

It is another question on the list of hundreds that she may never be able to ask.

Edea finds a purple stuffed cat, and wiggles it in Hana's face; the girl lets out a giggle and her limbs flail, reaching for the toy and not quite making it. Edea smiles; this is an old, familiar game. She played it a hundred times with her son until he grew up and then a thousand times again with orphans brought to her doorstep.

Eventually, her granddaughter tires of this game, her bright eyes slipping closed, and Edea simply sits, rocking her gently.

Seifer walks in.

His face is unreadable when he lifts Hana out of her arms; he doesn't ask for permission, doesn't wait for her to be ready to let go—she will _never _be ready to let go.

Hana twists her little head to rest against the crook of his neck; Seifer kisses the side of his daughter's head softly, turning away from his mother with the old hands and the decaying face and the pain that Edea feels will turn her inside out with the force of it.

"Where's her—never mind." Seifer shoulders the bag, shoving the purple cat back into its depths.

Edea breathes in, breathes out.

"How is she?" she asks, finally.

"Okay," Seifer says, and he won't _look _at her.

Relief floods through her. "Thank goodness. I was so worried…"

He makes a noncommittal noise, crouching in front of the baby carrier on of the floor. Hana doesn't protest when he eases her into it, buckling the straps and then double-checking them.

She remembers Cid being that cautious, triple-checking everything, so nervous that he would screw one thing up and that would be it for their newfound son. He had driven the entire trip back to their house by the sea at ten miles under the speed limit. Seifer had slept the entire ride, lulled into slumber by the rumbling of tires against the road, such a little thing that Edea was afraid to look away from him at all for fear that he would vanish.

"Look," Seifer says finally, rising to his feet. He doesn't meet her gaze, and runs his hand back through his hair. "I don't want you to get the wrong idea about this."

"About what?"

"This." He makes a gesture with his hand, encompassing his daughter. "This was an emergency. This isn't— just don't fucking expect this again."

"Seifer, I wouldn't hurt her. I never intended to hurt you." It is _insane_, that she has to keep justifying this to him. He is her son. She would _never—_

_-you want to be saved from this predicament_

The words rocket through her mind, so fast that she thinks she might have hallucinated them, her voice—not her voice—her hands—not her hands—

She reaches for her son's hand, a fist at his side.

He takes a step back, jerking his fingers out of her grasp, his jaw tense. "Yeah, well, you can't change history." His words are bitter.

_No,_ Edea thinks, _you can't. _

He leaves, taking her granddaughter with him.

_xx_

Her hands look simply like hands. No talons, no dark veins etching whorls under her skin. Her feet are not lions' paws; she has no horns, she has no wings. Her eyes are dark, and sad, and ordinary. She remembers gold fire, a mantle of feathers.

But that is Ultimecia. That is not Edea Kramer.

Edea Kramer looks back at her in the mirror, a perfectly ordinary older woman, pushing fifty gracefully. Her long jersey dress is blue, a good color against her skin. What is it, then, that makes him so afraid of her? What can she change, so he will not see this monster that used to wear her face?

Edea shuts off the lights in the washroom, closes the door gently behind her, and drops into one of the overstuffed chairs near the window of her borrowed bedroom.

She buries her face in her hands. The sobs come, great, choking things that consume her and she hasn't cried like this since her _mother_ died when she was twenty-three, falling apart at the seams. She will never be able to put herself back together. There is no hope, no future. Her son has written her off for good, and she knows that he is not the villain in this piece.

He never was. He was always such a good, brave boy, and she has destroyed him, torn him apart, ruined him in a way that sending him to Cid's shining, gleaming new school never would—she had _known_. She'd always known her husband's purpose in building Garden.

He had told her that it was to protect her, save her from committing the sins of the past. She is not Adel. She is not Ultimecia.

She is Edea Kramer.

And somehow, that is so much _worse_ than anything she could ever be—

-_Boy, she whispers into his ear, raking her nails across his flesh and his exhalation is ragged (no! she screams, no, no nononoooooo, but she cannot be heard, she is trapped, her fists beating violently against the inside of her chest and she _sees _e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n- g.)_

Dark spectre fingers reach inside of her, and the pain is unbearable, and this is not her, she is _not _Ultimecia! She cannot—she cannot—

"Edea!"

The floor rushes up to meet her, and her bones are so fragile and the carpet is not soft, not soft.

"Edea!" Her husband—her knight, he will always be her _knight_, is here, and he has gathered her up into his arms, and he is so strong. He will always be stronger than she is—

She doesn't know how to explain to him what is going on; his name is all that issues from her lips. _Cid_, _my darling, my protector, my knight. _The scent of hospital antiseptic surrounds him, the foreboding stink of tragedy and death and fear—

And the secret, the secret that she has kept all of her life, until she has grayed and wrinkled and ruined-

Her pulse is a raven's wings beating in her ears.

"Tell him…" she whispers, _tell him that I'm so—_

The secret is that

she

is

so

afraid

_xx_

It is Zell who comes and finds Seifer a couple of hours after his talk with Laguna, skidding around the corner into Quistis' room, startling them both. Seifer glares at him.

"Private party," he snaps. Don't hospitals have _visiting _hours anymore? Security? Something? A padded room they could shove Dincht in for the duration would be swell.

Dincht hovers awkwardly in the doorway, jittering like he's had fifteen cups of coffee. "Dude, you need to come with me."

Seifer sighs in annoyance. He doesn't have the patience for Dincht's stupid games right now. "Why?"

"It's Edea."

_Great. _She's practically stalking him at this point. He wonders if he should get a restraining order. What part of _no_ isn't acceptable to her? "I already told her, I don't want to talk—"

Zell holds up his hands. "No, dude, seriously. You have to come with me. Like, right now."

"What's wrong?" Quistis asks; her voice is still mangled to hell. It hurts just to _listen _to her.

"She's had a heart attack, man. It's not good. Just… come _on_, okay? Cid sent me to get you."

He's joking. He has to be joking. This is a bid for attention, for Seifer to take _pity_ on her. It's not very fucking _funny_, if it's a joke.

"Go," Quistis orders him.

The elevator takes forever, finally sliding its doors open to admit them into a carriage that apparently needs to stop at _every _fucking floor between seven and one. Seifer jabs at the door closed button to no avail. The elevator continues to take its leisurely time, stopping, sliding open the doors, letting in more bodies until there isn't any room to breathe.

They should've taken the fucking stairs.

Three minutes later, the elevator announces that they are at the first floor. Seifer shoves his way through the crowd, ignoring the rude comments he gets in his wake. Dincht is behind him, directing him down the labyrinth of halls to the ER.

Sometime in the past twenty-four hours, the emergency room has calmed, returned to some semblance of order, no longer the field triage unit it had resembled when Seifer had first burst through those doors, feeling like his damn heart was going to explode right out of his chest, because Quistis was _alive_—

He walks, even strides, one foot in front of the other, his sneakers making little sound against the tile floor. He walks, while Dincht moves two, three, four steps ahead of him, wondering why the hell Seifer won't hurry up.

If he runs, it is real. If he walks, it is not real.

_Real? _

_Not real? _

A nurse directs them down a hall, away from the sights and smells and sounds of the emergency room, where people come when they might die. If they are leaving, it's not real. Dincht was exaggerating. Edea is an old woman; old people make every ache and pain into a near-death experience. Not real.

This is what keeps Seifer putting one foot in front of the other. Not. Real.

He won't forgive her for this. For the way his feet propel him forward. For the way Dincht is talking to him, begging him to hurry up, like this is life or death. It is another sin that his mother has made. Another thing he can add to the list.

It's cold down this hall. There is a doorway at the end of the corridor, when he looks, opening and closing as hospital personnel come in and out, in a rainbow hue of scrubs and white coats and solemn expressions. There is a small group of seats in an alcove just before the door. There is someone dying in that alcove, strangled choking sounds that Seifer thinks someone should be made aware of .

It is his father making these noises, these inhuman wails that only the destruction of one's whole world can create in a man. It is the universal howl of death. It is—

_Not real_, he reminds himself.

Zell crouches by the old man's side, one hand on Cid's shoulder. "Oh, man," he says, and his face is scrunching up like _he's _going to fucking cry. "No. No, no."

This isn't happening.

This isn't _happening. _

_You can't change the past. _

"_Fuck_!" Seifer snarls. His foot lunges out and makes contact with an empty chair, sending it sailing down the corridor, where it crashes into the wall. Cid's sobbing fills up the entire space, ricocheting off the walls, shrapnel that hits Seifer on every goddamned plane of his body, and he can't _deal _with more of this shit—

"Seifer," his father says, and Cid is reaching for him—they always want to _touch _him, they can't just leave him alone— "Son, please…"

He doesn't know how to respond to the way that this ghost of the bravest man that little Seifer Almasy had ever known (to the weakest man that grown Seifer Almasy has ever _seen_) begs, like a child—

There is nothing to say—when he digs down deep inside, he comes up empty.

Has he ever had anything? Or has this been just an illusion, a fantasy of time compression? Is this the real end? Is he going to wake up in the middle of a gray quarry again, alone, alone, alone—

His father is still waiting for an answer.

Seifer walks away, out the door, into Esthar's cold night.

_xx_

It is hours before he comes back, darkness giving way to dawn, and Hana has woken up for her early morning feeding. Quistis sits on the edge of her hospital bed, trying to avoid tangling her daughter in wires and cords. She guides the bottle to Hana's mouth, carefully.

Her depth perception is off, just a hair. Hana whines, her face scrunching up in protest at the object touching her chin.

They have offered her a nurse from the maternity ward, just to give her a hand, but Quistis has declined. She doesn't need help. She can do this, dammit, given half a chance.

Quistis corrects her aim, lifting the bottle up a half inch. She succeeds this time; her daughter calms.

The door opens, and closes. A tall figure slips into the dim room.

He sits in the folding chair across from her, elbows on his knees, chin masked by his hands, and looks at her. He doesn't have to say anything. She knows the outcome already—Zell has called her room, grief mangling his voice into something foreign, to tell her that Edea is dead.

She shifts her hand up on the back of Hana's neck, better supporting the infant's head. Seifer remains silent, still.

Their conversation from earlier seems a million miles away, a casual suggestion slipping from his lips, a bright spot among all the chaos, a comment that there's a ring that he thought she might like, in a little shop along the beach.

"Seifer," she says, and his eyes flick up toward her face. "I… maybe a late summer wedding?"

It is all she has that isn't _I'm sorry_, and they've used that phrase so often that the novelty of it has worn off between them. It means nothing, now, words to say when there isn't anything else.

There is the barest flicker of a smile at the edge of his lips, here and gone so fast that Quistis thinks she might have imagined it. She sets down the empty bottle, easing the weary child to her shoulder.

Eventually, Seifer lifts Hana from her arms, settling her in the borrowed bassinet right next to the bed, and then sits down at the head of her cot, his back against the wall. Quistis eases herself back against him, trying not to dislodge the electrodes stuck to her skin. His arms come around her, his chin rests in her hair.

She doesn't remember falling asleep.


	6. take what the water gave me

_**SIX. **_

The room is too small for this many people; Squall refrains from the urge to tug at the collar of his shirt, crisp and pressed and brand new, a packaged deal that came with a complementing tie. It is dark blue. He straightens it over the buttons on the shirt.

His leg is _killing _him. Squall tries to ignore the pain, shifting in the uncomfortable wheelchair. He wishes that he'd taken his doctor up on the offer of stronger painkillers, but he knows he can't do this press conference drugged out of his mind. It wouldn't set a good _precedent_. It would make him look weak. Garden cannot have a weak commander.

Laguna sits next to him. His father looks less like a hippie and more like a president, in a neatly tailored dark suit with an Estharian flag pin on his left lapel. Laguna picks up the stack of note cards in front of him and taps the edge of the pile once against the table, straightening the stack.

Squall has a single sheet of paper, with a neatly typed speech written on it that he has no intent of reading.

Kiros walks over, leaning between them. "There anything you want me to tell these animals?"

"No questions," Squall says, before Laguna can open his mouth. "No," he emphasizes. "Any information Garden has at this point is eyes-only. I don't want people inferring things from a slip of the tongue."

And god knows, he's probably capable of letting something vital slip right now. The only sleep he's capable of is the kind chemically-induced. Grief weighs heavy on his shoulders. Edea had raised him, for god's sake, long enough to show him that there was good in this world, before he got cast off into Garden's hands.

And now she is dead.

It isn't _fair. _But Squall Leonhart has had a lifetime to learn that nothing is.

"Are you alright?" Laguna asks.

Squall nods. "Yeah. Fine. Let's just get this over with."

"Okay, then."

The lights make sweat bead on the back of his neck; Squall ignores it. There is the whisper of a dozen cameras booting up, thirty microphones pointed in their faces. He hates press conferences. It's one of the things he hadn'tmissed about leaving Garden initially. All this… public-relations nonsense that interferes with the real work he has to do.

Maybe he'll quit again, before they decide they're going to throw him out anyway.

He sighs, trying to straighten himself upright in the wheelchair. There is only so far he can go, though, because of the brace around his leg; he gives up. Whatever. It doesn't matter; the media will forgive this image of him, this wounded soldier.

His father begins speaking. Squall looks straight ahead, into the nearest camera, his face schooled into careful neutrality.

What was that saying that his wife likes? The show must go on? He has never been a theater person, but he thinks he finally understands the reference.

Beside him, his father begins to speak. Squall finds Rinoa's face in the crowd, and she smiles at him, reassuringly.

The show goes on. His leg aches.

_xx_

They throw her out, back into the real world, three days later, after she passes a round of tests and promises to follow up at the medical center in Dollet. She is given a pair of dark glasses, with the orders to wear them any time she goes outside or into over-bright light.

She can see, and that's what matters most to them. It's not a hundred percent, like she had been warned, but they think it will improve steadily, as long as she keeps a regular appointment with her physician.

Anyway, they need the bed she's taking up.

Squall has arranged for them to fly back with a dozen other discharged SeeDs; he won't take no for an answer. Besides, he argues, it's the straightest shot to get them home. Quistis doesn't put up a fight. She tells him that they'll be back next Saturday, for the funeral. Maybe.

She doesn't know if she's going to be able to get Seifer back here voluntarily. She doubts it. He hasn't said more than a handful of words to anyone in the past couple of days. He's subdued, silent, and it scares her, a little. She hopes being out of Esthar will relieve him of some of the weight on his shoulders.

His mother has been out of his life for a long time, she knows, since he was first sent to Garden, and Edea has essentially been dead to him since after the war, when he had the aftermath of his actions to deal with, all of this blood on his hands, and she came away clean. Her actual death is just a casual kick in the gut as a reminder, and don't let the door hit him on the way out.

The flight is the longest three hours Quistis has ever spent, and Hana fusses for most of it, grumpy with the pressure in her delicate ears. Quistis gets her to accept a pacifier at one point, but it's an extremely temporary solution. She's grateful that this flight is filled with soldiers who know better than to complain about things they cannot control; still, she feels guilty, and shoots apologetic looks at anyone who passes.

Seifer spends most of the time staring out the window, his chin propped on his hand and his expression blank. Hana reaches for him frequently, her little limbs flailing—somewhere over the ocean, Quistis puts her into his lap just so she can have a moment's peace. It startles him into awareness for the first time in hours. She hands him the last of Hana's bottles and he feeds her without comment or complaint.

They land in Balamb. Seifer shoulders most of the luggage and Quistis carries their daughter.

They catch one of the last weekend ferries to Dollet, and for a wonder, there is a cab idling outside the ferry station. It drops them off at their front door.

She expects her house to be in ruins, or burned to the ground, honestly. But it stands intact, the door locked, mail piling up in the box. Seifer fishes his keys out of his pocket and unlocks the door. Inside, it is dark, quiet, and warm. He'd remembered to turn off the air conditioning before he left.

Seifer leaves their bags in the hallway and takes the sleeping child from her, disappearing upstairs. After a few moments, she hears the shower turn on. Quistis fiddles with the air conditioning, retrieves the stack of mail, and sets a pot of coffee to brew.

The answering machine indicates five messages, all from telemarketers. She deletes them systematically without listening to them. There are three bills coming due; she pulls the envelopes from the stack and leaves them on the counter. There is the May issue of _Weapons Monthly_, addressed to Seifer but really for both of them. Her subscription ran out in December; there is no point in getting two of the same magazine when they both toss it immediately after reading it anyway. She adds this to his pile, and goes to work opening hers.

Two of her credit card companies have made good on their promise to expedite her replacement cards—her bag is lost, somewhere in the smoldering ruins of Esthar's convention center. She makes the requisite activation calls for each of them, and then sets the handset of their one house phone back in its cradle.

She has to get a new cell. She doesn't even _want _to think about having to replace all of her contacts. Quistis sighs, and adds it to the list she's started scribbling on the back of the cable bill envelope. Maybe she won't replace anyone's numbers, just Seifer's and Hana's pediatrician's and her doctors'. Too many of her stored numbers are Garden and affiliates; she has no reason to stay tethered like that. Xu's number is gone, and maybe it's better that way. She won't be reminded, every time she scrolls through her contacts list, that her best friend is dead.

There is a letter postmarked from Centra, addressed to both of them. She's trying to decide if she should throw it away when Seifer comes down the stairs in his usual loping stride, wearing only a pair of sweatpants. He's finally shaved the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw, and he looks better for it, less weary.

Seifer makes a beeline for the coffee. "You want some?" he asks, and his voice is gruff.

"Yes," she says absently, fiddling with the envelope. She drops it onto the counter. "There's mail for you."

He shrugs. "I'll look at it later."

The mug he passes her is warm under her touch; she drinks, and revels in the taste of _fresh _coffee, not that crap they were passing off under its name in the hospital cafeteria. "Is Hana asleep?"

A nod, and some of his damp hair falls across his forehead. He needs a haircut.

Seifer opens the refrigerator and stands in front of it. He comes up empty. "We need to go to the store," he comments, shutting the door.

"In the morning. I'm too tired right now. Order something in."

He flips through the stack of menus they keep in a magnetic caddy stuck to the side of the fridge. "Pizza?"

"Sure. Get something with veggies on it, though."

If anyone had told her that a couple of years ago, she'd be sitting in her kitchen discussing what to have for dinner with Seifer Almasy, she would've laughed until she cried. If they'd told her that she would have given birth to his _child_, she would have had them committed to the nearest psychiatric facility.

It's funny, how only a couple of years have changed everything, how he's become such an integral part of her life that she cannot imagine him gone, no matter how angry he makes her sometimes, or how badly she wishes that she could just have some _alone _time again, or what their neighbors say, about the SeeD and the villain playing house next door.

Quistis drains her coffee, and sets the mug in the sink. "I'm going to grab a shower," she tells him. "And then maybe lie down."

Traveling is exhausting. She thinks it might be time to invest in a nanny; all she wants to do is sleep for three days.

He nods, the house phone tucked between his ear and shoulder as he orders dinner. "You have your card?" he mouths; she passes him one of the new ones, the Galbadian Express. He reads the number off into the handset, and then hands it back to her. The shiny blue rectangle of plastic reminds her that she's going to have to get her license replaced, and go to the bank, and see if there's any way that half a dozen unused gift cards can be reissued. And make a new set of keys, including the car key—Seifer's got the spare on his key ring. At least her insurance card will be easy to obtain—they had merged their plans together back in December, at her _just in case_ insistence.

She'd meant if, say, Hana had gotten hurt, and he couldn't get in touch with her, not, _in case I get accidentally involved in a terrorist bombing._

Squall hadn't said anything to her about if anyone had claimed responsibility yet, but it doesn't surprise her. She isn't a SeeD. No matter how good of friends they are, there are things she will no longer be allowed to know. She'll always be just a civilian, now, Garden jets and the commander's preferential treatment notwithstanding.

Quistis takes the stairs slowly, keeping her fingers loose on the handrail, still not quite trusting of her depth perception. The bathroom mirror is still foggy from Seifer's shower; she ditches her clothes and stands naked with her hand under the spray as she waits for the water to warm up. It doesn't take nearly as long as it usually does. Quistis steps over the edge of the tub, and draws the curtain closed.

It is the best thing she has felt in days, the barrage of water beating at her neck, easing away some of the soreness in her back and shoulders. Hospital beds are very high on her list of least favorite things, and that _includes_ the Garden dorm beds, which were roughly the equivalent of sleeping on rocks.

She scrubs shampoo into her long hair, taking her time to rinse it all out, and slathers in conditioner. Her fingers accidentally graze the wound in the back of her head a few times, leaving her flinching.

Maybe _she_ should get a haircut, hack it all off up to her chin so she doesn't have to go through so much effort. All she does now is toss it in a hasty ponytail in the morning, anyway. Quistis shuts off the shower and steps out. Her robe hangs from a hook on the back of the bathroom door; she wraps the soft flannel around her.

Quistis turns the blow dryer on, tugging a brush through her hair as she tries to hasten the drying process. She leaves her hair hanging loose around her shoulders, brushes her teeth, gathers up her bundle of clothes from the floor, and turns off the bathroom light.

She tosses the clothes in the hamper in their bedroom, and checks on her daughter. Hana is still sleeping, curled up in her crib. Quistis closes the door most of the way, then pads back downstairs.

Seifer is sprawled in the armchair near the window, gazing outside at the twilit street, his coffee mug resting on his thigh, his fingers curled around the cup so tightly that she is surprised it hasn't shattered. She says his name. He doesn't respond.

There is a knock on the door, and Quistis answers it; she scribbles her name on the bottom of the receipt, takes the box from the delivery guy, and shuts the door. She sets it on the kitchen table; a glance at the contents reveals tomatoes, black olives and bell peppers. She plates two slices and carries them back into the living room.

"Seifer," she says again, and he starts, glancing up at her. "Here."

He takes a plate and sets it on the end table, putting the mug next to it. She sets hers down on the coffee table; his fingers reach out, hooking in the belt of her robe as she's turned around, and he pulls her back into his lap. His hands come to rest on the small swell in her belly that won't seem to go away, no matter how many miles she runs. She covers his fingers with her own.

"You okay?" she asks. He nods, his face against her shoulder; she feels the movement through the flannel of her robe. She squeezes his hand. His exhalation is ragged, and it breaks her heart.

"I keep thinking…" he says, and he cannot finish the sentence.

She runs her thumb along his. "You didn't know that this would happen. You couldn't have."

Seifer sighs. "I could've lied to her. It wouldn't have mattered."

Her thumb runs along the side of his index finger. "I think it would've, to you."

Seifer disentangles one of his hands from hers, and sweeps the curtain of damp hair back from her neck, draping it over her shoulder. He pulls at the collar of her robe, drawing it back, his palm sliding across her clavicle, tracing a line through the hollow of her throat with his fingertips.

"I love you," he says, and it comes out a hollow whisper in her ear.

Quistis takes his hand and leads him upstairs, wordlessly. She lets her robe fall just inside the door to their bedroom, and pushes him back gently onto the bed, straddling his chest. Her fingers fist in his hair; she kisses him hard, open-mouthed. His hand slips down her stomach, between her thighs. She gasps against his lips, arching into his touch.

This is their grieving.

They make it last for as long as they can, desperately seeking comfort in each other, going to pieces in muffled swears and touching and frantic kisses that leave her lips aching. When Seifer lifts her hips and draws her closer, his fingers digging into her skin, Quistis clamps her hand over her mouth as she moans, unable to contain her cries.

The trick is to be quiet, and they have never been quite able to master it. She _misses_ their life from before, when all they had to worry about was pissing off the next door neighbors.

The world blanks out in a rush of heat; she is left shaking from her head to her toes, seeing spots and flashes that take an eternity to clear.

Seifer leans back against the headboard; her bones feel like liquid, and she curls up against him, running her fingers in absent circles over the taut muscles in his abdomen, her eyes closed. He moves behind her, shifting to the left; her fingers slide across his navel. The light changes, a lamp turning on. She hears the sound of his nightstand drawer opening, and then closing.

"Here," he says.

Quistis opens her eyes; he has a box in his hand, a small blue-velvet thing held near her face. She reaches up, lifting the lid carefully. Inside is a silver ring, with a sapphire stone. Three tiny diamonds cluster on either side.

She cannot speak for a second.

"It's not much, but—you don't really wear much jewelry," he says quietly.

"I thought you said you'd seen one in a store… Not—" Not that he'd _bought _one. Not that he'd planned this for who knew how long, even when they fought and screamed and when all she wanted to do was run away from everything—"When did you…?"

Seifer shrugs. "A couple months ago."

He lifts the ring out of the box and tosses the container aside. Quistis raises her left hand; he guides it onto her ring finger.

It is a perfect fit.

_xx_

Seifer leans his head against hers, studying the way the ring looks on her finger. The relief of her acceptance wars with the exhaustion weighing heavy on his bones. There is a hollow ache inside of him that he doesn't know how to deal with.

He should not be _grieving_, and yet there is no other word for it, this thing that gnaws away at him. Grieving for Fujin had been easy, because she was his _friend_, and he loved her, and at least that kind of sadness he could _deal _with, but this time—

The emptiness in his chest demands to be filled, and he doesn't know what he can sacrifice to appease it.

"It's beautiful," Quistis tells him softly. She is real and warm and solid in his arms. He reaches down for the bunched up comforter at their feet, drawing it up over them both.

He can't keep going alone anymore. He doesn't have the strength.


	7. lay me down

_**SEVEN. **_

Seifer Almasy sits in the sanctuary of his daughter's room and thinks about witches.

His eyes are heavy with exhaustion, and he knows that if he goes across the hall, lies down next to his fiancée, and tries to sleep, he will not be able to. This is a battle he has been fighting for hours (for days); it is a battle he cannot win.

This isn't fucking _fair. _

He shouldn't have to feel like this, carved out from the inside.

His mother is dead. He should be running through the streets, celebrating. He should throw his own damn parade. He is _free _of her, of the whispers and memories and the fear that one day he is going to walk down the street again and see her, and she is going to call him _son _and he is going to walk right back into her clawed embrace-

The biggest regret Seifer Almasy has is that he didn't get to run her through himself. Her death is too neat for him, this convenient failure of her heart. There isn't any _closure_, the kind that would come with four feet of Galbadian steel sliding through her blackened soul. Squall Leonhart got _that_ particular glory, the murder of Ultimecia, the separation of mother from monster once and for all-

_Forgive me, Seifer, forgive me, I never meant to hurt you—_

_No_ is the mantra, the thing that keeps him awake at night. He wants to say it to her face, a hundred times, screaming it at her until the weight of it is gone from him. How could she ask that of him and then _die_ like that?

He gave her three hours with his daughter, and then told her to go to hell. He's pretty sure that makes him a horrible fucking person, but Seifer cannot find the energy to care anymore. He doesn't owe her anything.

The rocking chair leans back; he drags his hands down over his face. Is it too late to say no? That he's not going? That he's going to stay at home and maybe sit on the sofa for forty-eight hours and get blind stinking drunk?

He should be over this. It is seven years behind him, the last vestiges of his childhood dead and buried, and yet all it took was seeing her face to bring it all screaming back into his dreams and spare thoughts and—

Quistis begs him to talk to her, like it will help to tell her every filthy-dark secret born of war and torture and possession, _you would do _anything_ for your mother. _Like it will help to tell one of the three people who care about him in the entire fucking world that he's more messed up than she can _imagine_, because he had a thousand opportunities to stop her and he _didn't-_

_-his voice comes out pleading, desperate, and he doesn't recognize this person wearing his skin; this is Ultimecia's favorite game, breaking him down, drawing blood from his flesh as she digs her talons into his hips, her dark lips promising violence against his—_

Sometimes she wore Rinoa's face, just to see how he would react.

There is a stuffed bear sitting on the floor near his feet. Seifer reaches down and picks it up, squeezing it in his hands. _Seven years_, he reminds himself. It doesn't matter anymore; she is dead and he is alive. He wins, doesn't he? He has carved out a new family from the ruin of his life and _survived_ and moved on.

Less than two years from thirty, and he's still a chickenshit-scared little _boy_.

Seifer puts the bear into a stranglehold; the head comes off with a faint tearing around the fifth twist around. He swears under his breath.

Less than two years from thirty, and here he is, breaking his child's toys.

There is a trash can near the changing table; he lifts the lid and both pieces of the bear go inside. He leaves the nursery and pads across the hall. Their bedroom is dark, silent, still.

"Everything okay?" Quistis mumbles, turning her head toward him. Her voice is thick, heavy with sleep that he envies her for. Esthar has taken its toll on both of them, but he was not the one trapped in a bombed-out building. She deserves her rest. The alarm clock just on the other side of her head reads half past three—they have both become light sleepers. They haven't had a choice. It's basic survival: adapt or die.

"Yeah," he whispers. _No. _He doesn't know anymore. "Go back to sleep."

She makes a noise of assent and drops her head back onto her pillow.

He owes her the truth, this secret that sits hot and hard in his chest. He owes her _everything. _

Seifer draws back the covers and gets underneath them, the mattress shifting under his weight, his pillow soft under his head. Quistis is turned toward him, her hair splayed across her neck. Sometime during the past week, she has chopped off six inches of it and claims it easier to take care of.

It is hair. It will grow back. She can do whatever the hell she wants.

Quistis curls one fist up near her cheek, and her lips part, just a little bit. Everything in her face softens when she sleeps. It is strange, how much he knows about her now.

His entire world has been flipped sideways.

Seifer tears his gaze away from her, back up to the empty void of the ceiling.

The ceiling fan moves in lazy circles. He tracks the motion for a long time, until he can't stop his eyes from sliding closed, falling fast into slumber to the gentle susurrus of the fan. Seifer dreams of things dark and hazy and red, and does not remember very much of it.

The monitor is their alarm; just past six, he is dragged out of sleep by the crying coming from it. Next to him, Quistis rises with a sigh.

"I've got it," she murmurs. He doesn't argue. She leaves the door ajar when she walks out of the bedroom.

From the hall, he can hear noises, her voice over infantile wailing. The stairs creak a little as Quistis walks down them. The refrigerator door opens and closes. The faucet runs. Hana's crying subsides, eventually. Seifer turns onto his stomach, yanks the covers back somewhere up over his ribs, and buries his face in his pillow.

This house is too small.

The heady scent of coffee wakes him when she enters the bedroom a while later. "Hey," Quistis says gently, and her fingers brush through the hair just over his ear. Seifer opens his eyes to slits; she is fuzzy in his vision until he blinks to clear it. "Good morning."

This is the day they put Edea Kramer in the ground. _Good _is too enthusiastic.

His fiancée sets a mug on his nightstand, steam coiling off of it. He reaches for it, and his fingers make it to the edge of the mattress before he can't be bothered anymore.

Seifer rolls onto his side, bunching the pillow under his head, and watches Quistis as she moves away from him, toward the closet. She dresses without fanfare, exchanging the t-shirt she wears to sleep in (one of his before she claimed it, a well-washed green thing that he'd loaned her way back when and she'd never returned) for black underwear he doesn't remember seeing before. She sits on the edge of the bed and slides a pair of stockings over her legs.

He reaches out and brushes the small of her back. Her skin is silk under his fingertips; the last lingering bruises from the wreckage of Esthar are beginning to fade.

"We have to leave by eight-thirty," she tells him. "You should get up." She stands, and shimmies the stockings up around her hips. From the depths of the closet, Quistis withdraws a black dress, undoes the zipper, and drops it over her head. She crosses back to him, and sits, drawing her hair up over one shoulder. "Give me a hand?"

He obliges. The zipper goes up. She lets her hair fall, bright against the muted fabric. It comes to just over the middle of her back now.

"Up," she tells him, swatting his bare shoulder gently. From across the hall, Hana lets out another wail, and Quistis leaves him.

Seifer pulls the comforter up over his shoulders and closes his eyes again.

_xx_

He's gone back to sleep when she comes back in, the blankets drawn up to his chin. Quistis sighs.

"Seifer," she says, and tries to keep the patience in her voice. She hits the light switch; the light on the ceiling fan comes on, brightening the room.

He doesn't respond, just buries his face into the pillow. She _knows _he doesn't want to do this. She doesn't want to get on a plane to Centra again any more than he does. But at least she's up, and dressed, and mostly ready to go. The coffee near his head, a peace offering, is untouched.

She had given him every opportunity to back out and say he was staying home. God knows she'd _wanted_ him to say it, to yell and scream and _fight_, not the passive, _yeah, I'm going_, that came out of his mouth every single time she asked him. The tickets out of Dollet's tiny airport are nonrefundable now, though. They've committed to this trip. It's not like she can just call Squall and tell him to take off without them.

Hana gets her fingers around a handful of Quistis' hair and _yanks_. She disentangles her daughter's hand from the strands. So much for a haircut solving that problem. Hana laughs, a bright peal of a sound.

Seifer's eyes slide open at the noise, slivers of green nearly hidden by his dark eyelashes.

She sits in the curve his body makes, placing their daughter gently down on the bed between the two of them. Hana stares wide-eyed at her father's mostly hidden face, a grin spreading from cheek to cheek; she always knows exactly where he is. She's a smart baby.

Still, it hurts to think on her doctor's words—Hana will always be at least a month behind developmentally, the fault of early labor. Quistis' fault. Her body had failed her in this thing that it was supposed to be _made _to do, and it is because of Garden; all of the paramagic running around in her veins messed her up so badly internally that it is a miracle that Hana is even _here_. Quistis Trepe must accept the penalty for her actions, for needing to feel _something_, anything at all, in the wake of Centra's destruction.

Seifer's hand slips out from beneath the covers and brushes Hana's tiny nose gently; she giggles and grabs for his finger. He lets her win, guiding his hand into her awkward grasp.

"What time do we have to leave?" he says hoarsely, and the end of his question is punctuated by a yawn that makes him hunch up with the force of it. What time had he come back in? Four? She can't remember, only that when she'd woken up before six to Hana's fussing insistence that she be fed, he'd had his back to her, curled up near the edge of the mattress.

She wonders what he was dreaming about. God knows he can't talk to her about it. The longest conversation they've had this week was the day they came home from Esthar. They haven't had anything resembling sex in the past six days. He goes for runs instead, long ones that leave him sweat-soaked and exhausted. It has been the longest week that she can remember.

He's running from Ultimecia, from a past he cannot escape, and Quistis thinks it might kill him.

She cannot begin to comprehend what he must be thinking, but she wants to _try_. He just changes the subject whenever she opens her mouth. It isn't like she doesn't know how he feels. She was the same way after Centra, a zombie, until he'd saved her, really, dragging her out of her bottomless grief over her _failure_, where three cadets ended up dead because of her mistake.

She still mourns them, almost every night, a flash of red in a dream that could be about anything else.

"I already told you. Eight-thirty. Go get a shower, get dressed. Kadowaki said she'd be here at eight." She gently extricates his finger from Hana's loose grasp, and is rewarded with a cry of indignation from her daughter. Seifer pushes himself up, leaning against the headboard, picking up the mug. The edge of the scar on his abdomen comes into view as he shoves away the blankets, defacing his flesh.

It is a casually cruel reminder of all that they have been through, and every time she sees it, Quistis Trepe doesn't know if she wants to scream or cry.

She settles for walking out of the bedroom, and goes downstairs to wait for Dr. Kadowaki, gracious in her willingness to take leave from Garden for a couple of days. The doctor is one of the few people on earth whom Quistis trusts enough to leave her child alone with.

Eventually, they will have to stop relying on Garden. She has a sheaf of resumes on her desk from prospective nannies, pulled from websites and recommendations at her doctor's office. It's an impossible decision.

Quistis twists the sapphire ring on her finger absently.

Seifer eventually comes downstairs with his duffel bag slung over his shoulder, wearing the same black suit that he wore to Xu's funeral. His tie hangs unknotted around his neck, a garrote of cloth.

He pours himself another cup of coffee, sitting in one of the chairs at the table. _Talk to me_, she wants to scream at him, _tell me what's wrong with you so I can help_.

Seifer drinks his coffee; Quistis says nothing. The healing wound on the back of her head throbs, just a little.

_xx_

Squall straightens the lapels of his dress uniform, critically studying his reflection in the mirror. It had taken him, his wife, and a borrowed hospital orderly ten minutes of swearing and careful balancing to get the black trousers on over the brace; the silhouette of it still sticks out against the crisply pressed fabric.

Squall tugs the cloth in one direction, and then another, trying to straighten it out over his knee. It does not yield to his demands. He lets his hand drop, and picks up the crutches from where they are balanced against the edge of the bed.

"Quistis and Seifer just got here," Rinoa says, coming into the bedroom of their borrowed suite. "They're at the airport."

Squall picks up his watch from the dresser and fastens it around his wrist. "Okay." The service is scheduled to start at four; the plane to Centra leaves in an hour. It is under orders to wait for him.

His wife reapplies a coat of her somber lipstick and studies her reflection in the mirror. Black is not her color. It has never been her color. She deserves to be in color, vibrant, bright. "You ready?"

As he'll ever be.

Squall eases himself to his feet, wincing at the sharp pain in his leg as he tries to steady his balance. He wishes he'd taken the hospital up on their offer of a wheelchair. The elevator whisks them down, and lets them out in the lobby of the palace.

Laguna's driver takes all four of them to the airport. For a wonder, his father doesn't try to fill the silence with awkward conversation. They board the jet without hassle.

Quistis catches his eye from her seat near the middle of the plane. Next to her, her fiancé—Squall still can't quite apply the term without grimacing, but he supposes it was inevitable—has his head back against the seat, his eyes closed, headphones stuffed in his ears, deliberately ignoring the SeeDs all around him.

Idly, he wonders how many of them still want Seifer dead, lined up in front of a firing squad. Squall had expected him to not show his face at all; who would want the lapdog there, come to see his witch-mother put into the ground?

But a battered, beaten-down ex-knight is the least of Commander Squall Leonhart's concerns. He nods a greeting at Quistis, then eases himself down in a set in the front row, next to Rinoa. His pain pills are in a bottle in Rinoa's purse; he dry-swallows two of them. The plane taxis down the runway, taking off into the afternoon sky.

_xx_

Centra is boiling hot in May. He'd forgotten how bad it was; sweat beads along the back of his neck immediately. Seifer shrugs out of his suit jacket, draping it over his shoulder as he follows Quistis down the stretch of asphalt away from the plane. There is a fleet of cars waiting for the funeral guests at the end of the impromptu airstrip. They get in one.

The drive takes twenty minutes. They end up in front of his childhood home, and everything looks exactly like he remembers it. Flowers are everywhere, and the lighthouse is still standing.

Has the house always been that small? He remembers coming home for the last time, when he was fourteen, and feeling like the walls were closing in on him.

Quistis squeezes his hand, gently, and opens the car door, a rush of heat coming to slap them in the face. It is cooler, here, by the sea, but not by much. He leaves his jacket off. The crushed stone drive of the orphanage gives way to spongy sea grass under his shoes, and Seifer's feet sink with every step; perhaps the earth will swallow him.

Chairs are set up in neat rows by one of the flowering trees at the edge of Edea's garden. Guests are filing into them, a somber flock of dark clothes and solemn faces. Who are all of these people? How do they know his mother?

Everyone knows his mother, the woman who tore apart the world.

Seifer sits in the back, at the end of a row. The ocean roars in his ears; when he glances at the sea, it is not the maelstrom he is expecting. Seifer looks back at the grave.

Her coffin is blonde wood, gleaming in the sunlight, suspended over the six-foot hole in the earth. He has a glimpse of her in his mind's eye, a desiccated corpse in a tattered black dress, food for worms.

_-his name from her lips, something obscene, something filthy, her fingers leaving scratches along his throat—_

Sweat rolls down his face. He wipes it away with the back of his hand.

Leonhart stops next to them and says something to Quistis. She says something back. Nothing registers. Squall is gone, limping off on crutches.

There are too many SeeD uniforms here, Seifer thinks. He doesn't understand. _The witch is dead_, a voice whispers in his ear, and he thinks that maybe they've just come to rejoice.

Raijin arrives, and sits on the other side of Quistis. There is a muted conversation. The rows all around them fill up. He stares at some sort of blue flower, growing in the ground near his shoe.

This was a terrible idea.

_-boy? Or man? _

Someone begins speaking, a solemn intonation. When he looks up, it is Leonhart, presiding over this circus of grief.

God, why is it so _hot_? The knot of his tie is loosened. He still feels like he is suffocating. Quistis puts her small hand against his back, tracing a path through the fabric of his shirt.

He doesn't want to be here anymore.

-_mommy, look out, I'll save you from the monsters—_

Seifer puts his face in his hands.


	8. let the only sound

_**EIGHT. **_

In the wake of the burial comes a catered gathering, elegant, extravagant finger food prepared by the presidential kitchen staff of Esthar. Squall sits on the Kramers' floral-printed sofa and knocks back two more of his painkillers with a mouthful of iced tea. Rinoa is off somewhere, talking to Selphie and Irvine.

Quistis drifts through the crowd, the skirt of her dress swirling about her knees, and spies him. "Hey," she says, edging her way around a group blocking her path, "have you seen Seifer?"

Squall shakes his head. "Maybe outside?"

"Maybe." She sits down next to him with a sigh. Her hair is shorter now. He compliments her on it. "Thanks. It's just… easier, you know?"

Squall shrugs. He doesn't, really.

She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear; he catches a faint whiff of baby powder rising off of her skin, incongruous with this image he will always have of her, battle-ready and powerful. _Mother _is a label he would have never applied to her; he has seen her break men's necks with her bare hands, and rip them from stem to stern with Save the Queen. She has devoured monster guts in search of spells, torn apart the world to help him save the person he cared about more than anything. He has seen her caked in blood and carnage, and think nothing of it. She hauled him out of a ruined building, where he, honestly, thought that maybe he would finally die.

"Thanks for loaning us Kadowaki," Quistis says. "We really appreciate it."

_We. _For some reason, his mind latches on the plural, rolling it around. _We. _

"I thought you could use the help." Half of Garden is still in Esthar's hospital anyway, recovering or not—he has gotten a list of the updated deceased, five more from today alone. People always remember the bomb going off, but they never realize the ruin that comes in its wake, or the paperwork that follows. "She's always liked you."

Quistis nods; she has taken her phone out of her bag and is glancing at it, probably expecting a dozen new messages about the status of her child. "How's the leg?" she asks finally, putting her phone away.

He shrugs again. "Hurts like hell, but— how's your head?"

"Still attached. I had an appointment on Thursday, though. I'm not a hundred percent, but they're pretty sure that my vision's going to keep improving. I have to get new glasses, though."

He knows her terror, that she will wake up one morning in blackness, and is grateful for the good news. A SeeD is only as good as their body, and hers has failed her more than once.

Squall shakes his head. She is not a SeeD anymore. She has thrown that away. She is simply a woman now, a mother, an ex-soldier twisting a blue ring on her finger. "When's the wedding?"

"Hm? Oh. I don't know." She folds her hands in her lap. "Maybe August."

"Soon," Squall comments. Rinoa had started planning theirs over a year in advance. It had been a lavish affair; he doesn't remember a whole lot of it, considering he'd spent the entire time focused on her.

It feels weird, talking about weddings at a funeral. It feels even weirder talking about _Quistis' _wedding. But hell, it doesn't matter what he thinks of Seifer Almasy, as long as she is happy.

She smiles, a little. "I guess. I'm not really sure. It might get pushed back."

Squall glances away, at the wall, and his eyes skirt over the pictures on the wall. There is a collage of photos from his wedding, pictures of them as children, pictures of kids he doesn't remember. There are so many years of history on this one wall; the line ends, though, with a picture in a plain wooden frame. Seifer's face, caught in a moment of happiness, an impossibly small infant resting against his shoulder. It is the picture that Squall had printed for Edea, when it hadn't seemed like it would harm anything for her to have it, this one reminder that her son was still alive and well.

Had it really only been in February that he'd last been here?

It seems like so much longer.

Quistis catches him looking, and raises an eyebrow. "Where did she get that? I only sent it to you."

_Damn,_ he thinks_._ He cannot lie to her. "She asked for a copy. I didn't think—"

"I don't mind," Quistis says quickly. "He might. I don't."

Squall knows how awkward it was for all of them, afterward, the remembrance of Matron. Quistis had always been cordial, but he'd seen it in her eyes, how hard it was for her to trust the fact that Ultimecia was gone. No matter how much forgiveness was given, there was still the fact that for months, Edea had been their enemy.

"How's he dealing with it?" It's a question he doesn't want to ask, but there's something in her posture that suggests she needs to talk to someone. He is right.

Quistis sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. "Not well. I would've thought—he hated her. The fact that he even agreed to come here at all… I was expecting him to stay home and just… not care."

He knows how hard that is for her to say, and Squall Leonhart wants to find Almasy and punch him in the face for causing Quistis this sort of grief. Instead, he sits, and listens to her talk.

"Like, after Fujin died, he was upset, but at least he was _himself_. He still laughed and fought and talked to me. But you should have seen him this morning. He was practically catatonic." She fiddles with her engagement ring and stops abruptly, catching herself doing it. "He's been like this for days; he was fine for a little bit when we got back from Esthar, but it's just gone downhill from there. He's so distracted that I have to ask him things three times before he'll realize that I'm talking to him."

He can't imagine being in Almasy's shoes, seven years gone from starting a war because his mother said so, and being left to rot afterward. Squall still has the recordings somewhere, from Seifer's trial. There are a lot of gaping holes in the story that his old rival can't, or won't, fill in.

The last few recordings are simply Seifer's dull, flat voice, repeating, "I don't know. I don't remember," in response to what happened during the compression.

They'd ordered him away from Balamb. He'd dropped off the face of the earth for a while, and eventually turned up in Dollet. An arrest notification had passed through Balamb the first week he was there, when Seifer had gotten drunk and started a bar fight, putting three guys in the hospital because someone called him _lapdog. _

"Maybe he needs to see a shrink."

"Maybe…" She smiles faintly. "I know you don't really care about him. You don't need to hear all of our personal problems."

"I care about you," Squall says honestly. "I'll listen when you need to talk."

_I don't want you to say anything… I just want you to listen. _

How far they've both come from their teenage years.

"Is there anything you can tell me?" she asks. "About Esthar?" The subject change is abrupt. He is guilty of the same bad habit—the conversation is over.

"No one's come forward yet. We're still looking into it." It's frustratingly vague, but it's all he can give her. Squall flattens his right hand against the arm rest of the sofa, and brings his tea to his mouth with his left. "I could use an extra body on this one, Quistis," he says. "The offer's still open, if you want it."

Hell, he'd give her command of Garden right now if he thought she would say yes. He needs someone he can rely on, someone who won't fail to question his judgment if it needs it. Xu was steadfast, loyal, indispensible, a career soldier to her core, and Seifer Almasy had gotten her killed.

Her smile is sad. "You know I can't do that." Quistis stands. "I'm going to get some air," she says, and he watches her go, slipping through the throng of people.

_xx_

He hasn't been in the lighthouse since he was a kid. The door is unlocked. Seifer climbs the winding stairs slowly, one hand gliding along the narrow banister, the other holding a beer bottle loosely between his fingers. The whole thing smells of fresh paint—someone has been in here recently. His footsteps echo against the metal treads of the staircase that seems to wind upward forever.

The door at the top of the stairs is ajar. Seifer pushes it open the rest of the way. He doesn't remember what the room used to look like, but the massive light still takes up the center of the room. There are a few pieces of scattered furniture, a wicker chair, a small end table. There is a book open and face down on the table. He is moving forward to read the title when someone coughs.

There is an old man standing near the window, in a suit that doesn't quite fit.

_So much for being alone. _Seifer stops, and sighs irritably. It is enough noise that his father turns away from the window.

"Seifer," Cid says, and his tone is surprised. His face is hollow, somehow, sunken in at the cheeks. Grief wreaks havoc on whomever it touches. "What are you doing here?"

Seifer shrugs. He'd just wanted somewhere quiet to hole up and drink until the plane left, where people wouldn't judge him—he turns for the door, and his hand is on the knob when Cid's voice comes again.

"Don't go," Cid says. "Please. I wanted to talk to you."

He is tired of people saying that to him. Seifer leans against the wall and crosses his arms over his chest. "What?" he asks, and he almost doesn't recognize his own voice. When had he started sounding so _defeated_?

No wonder Quistis thinks he's going crazy.

He drinks, and realizes the bottle is empty. Seifer sets it down on the table, next to the book. The title is in a language he doesn't recognize. He brushes his fingers across the plain brown cover.

Cid crosses the space between them, and has to look up at him—his father's head comes to the middle of Seifer's chest. Has he always been that small? Seifer can't remember.

"I'm glad you came home. I know it's hard."

This isn't home—it's merely a place where he grew up with a dozen other kids who called his mother Matron and wondered why he didn't.

Home is in Dollet.

"Quistis asked me to come. I wouldn't have, otherwise."

His father nods, like Seifer's words aren't a surprise to him. Cid reaches out and touches his arm. Seifer glares at him, but Cid does not withdraw.

"You shouldn't have had to come back here like this." Cid's hand is wrinkled, pale on the white fabric of Seifer's shirt. It disgusts him, a little, to see how defeated Cid has become.

"I hadn't planned on coming back at all." Until Edea showed up out of _nowhere_, practically stalking him, and nothing was ever the same.

Cid's grip on his arm is surprisingly strong, for someone who looks like he could be taken down with a strong gust of wind. "I know how hard this is for you, Seifer. I just wish you'd realize how sorry she was, or how much she loved you."

He cannot deal with this, with Cid's worn-out pleading. Something in him gives, finally, snapping apart into a thousand shards.

"I don't _care_," he snarls. "I don't care what she said to you or how much she begged or cried, or how fucking _sorry _she is. You don't get to _presume _that you know exactly how I'm feeling—you threw me to the goddamned _wolves_ after the war. She was your _only _concern. I mattered exactly _shit _to you, _Dad_." The word is venomous. "You let them throw me out on my ass." He jerks his arm out of Cid's grip. "Don't act like you care about me now."

He remembers the last time he had seen his parents, after the trial, led out of the courtroom in handcuffs. The way Edea had smiled at him, reassuringly, the way that Cid had nodded once. Neither of them had even bothered to _find _him, afterward.

_Would you have gone to them if they had?_

He knows the answer is no. It still doesn't change a fucking thing.

His father's mouth gapes open, shocked at Seifer's violent outburst. He looks like a Balamb codfish gasping for air; he is ridiculous, weak. His words come out in disjointed nonsense. "She told me some—I'm so sorry, Seifer, for what we put you through. But that was Ultimecia, not your mother—whatever Ultimecia did that hurt you so badly, I'm _sorry._"

He is so _sick _of this argument—it doesn't matter whose face she wears, it is her voice, her fingers, her words, her skin—

"They're the same fucking _person_," Seifer yells, and there's heat in the corner of his eyes, and he swears to god, if he's fucking _crying-_ "She's not my mother. My _mom_ would not have-"

_-boy, she muses, trailing her nail down the line of his abdomen—_

-mommy, mommy, look at what I made for you—

He doesn't owe Cid any sort of explanation. Seifer rips open the door.

"Son—"

Seifer whirls on him, and at the last possible second stops himself from decking Cid Kramer right there in the lighthouse. His fist jerks to the right by an inch and rams into the wall next to his father's head instead. The wood paneling splinters under the force of the blow, chunks of it biting deep into his skin.

Cid's arms come up reflexively, shielding his head.

He wrenches his hand out of the wall. His fists fall to his sides; he can feel hot rivulets of blood run down his fingers. His hands are shaking.

"Don't call me that."

Seifer walks out of the lighthouse, taking the stairs two at a time. His hand is in _agony_. He does not bother to inspect the damage. He doesn't fucking care anymore.

_xx_

She finally finds him on the dock, his feet dangling into the sea, his shoes tossed off to the side and his pants rolled up to his knees. Quistis shifts his shoes and sits down next to him, smoothing her skirt underneath her.

Seifer says nothing. He is cradling his right hand in his lap; she spies streaks of dried blood over his fingertips.

She reaches for his hand. He swears at her touch, but does not pull away. "What happened?" she asks quietly, inspecting both sides of his hand—there are gashes all along his knuckles. It doesn't look like he's broken anything, though. He isn't an idiot, he knows how to throw a punch.

He shrugs. "Punched a wall."

It's as good a reason as any.

"You should at least clean it."

Seifer slips his hand from her grasp, and looks at it in vague surprise, brushing his fingers across the open wounds, like he hadn't realized how bad the damage actually was. "I guess."

She reaches out and touches his chin, tilting his head toward her. When his eyes meet hers, his expression is so hopeless that a knot forms in her throat. "What happened?" she asks again. He knows she isn't talking about his injury.

Seifer shakes his head, and covers her hand with his own, drawing it down from his face. "It doesn't matter," he tells her. "It's over."

"No," she says, "don't lie to me, Seifer."

His face tightens; a scowl crosses his lips. "I'm not lying to you. So what if I don't want to talk about crap that happened seven years ago?" He drops her hand.

Quistis exhales in frustration. "Because you're scaring me," she says, and it comes out much more upset than she had intended. "I don't know what the hell to do for you, and you won't _talk _to me."

He gets up abruptly and she follows him, scrambling to her feet. Seifer makes it halfway down the dock before he turns around and levels a finger in her face.

"So," he says, and his tone is harsh, "it's perfectly fucking _fine_ for you to have a nervous breakdown, and scare the shit out of _me_, and not tell me _anything_ about what's wrong, yet when I don't feel like talking for a few days, you get to guilt me into doing it? That's really fucking fair, Quistis. Seriously."

"This isn't the same thing," she says, and she is so angry that she has always been an easy crier, because the tears are flooding down her face. "I _told _you what happened in Centra. You knew what was wrong with me." The second time that they'd met, she'd wept into his shirt and he'd kissed her and that was _it_, the end of life as they'd both known it.

He rakes his fingers back through his hair. "I wasn't talking about Centra, babe."

_I don't feel like part of this family, either. _

There is a long silence. Of course he would deflect this back on her. Of _course. _She curls her fingers into fists and feels her nails dig into her palms. "Seifer…" she begins, but she is cut off by Raijin's yell that the plane is getting ready to leave.

Seifer shoves his socks and shoes back on his feet and walks to the fleet of cars ahead of her. He opens the door of one and gestures impatiently for her to get in first.

She does, and the door slams when he shuts it behind him.

"Maybe you should go to Galbadia for a while, with Raijin," Quistis says quietly as the car pulls away from the curb. "If you need space that badly."

"Fine," he says. "Whatever."


	9. be the overflow

_**NINE. **_

They have a reservation at a hotel in Esthar, and Seifer shoves the keycard in the door lock when they finally get there just shy of eleven. He is exhausted.

The room is small, a bed, a flat screen television, a tiny bathroom. Quistis drops her bag near the bed and pulls out her pajamas and toiletry kit. She slips off her engagement ring, setting it onto the table, and locks herself in the bathroom. The shower starts running.

Seifer sits on the bed, the mattress springy under him, and pulls off his shoes. His phone makes its dying battery noise at him—a rummage through his bag reveals that he has, in fact, managed to leave his charger at home. Quistis has hers tucked in the outer pocket of her trim gray duffel; he plugs it into an outlet and shoves the adapter into his phone.

They haven't exchanged more than a dozen words since they left Centra.

Seifer sighs.

He's not going to apologize—he didn't say anything _wrong_. She can be pissed at him all she wants.

His phone buzzes, a text from Raijin with the flight information for tomorrow in it.

He shouldn't be going to fucking Deling City, with its ghosts and blood-stained streets. He should be going _home_, with his fiancée, to his daughter, back to his normal life.

But part of him knows that Quistis is right. Maybe some space will do them both good, a chance to shed some of the constant responsibility. Maybe he'll get a full night's sleep for once. The idea of not having to drag himself out of bed for a three a.m. feeding is appealing.

Quistis' phone rings. He picks it up, glances at the display. Kadowaki. Something like worry thrums through him. Why the hell would she be calling so late?

Seifer answers it warily. "Yeah?"

The good doctor sounds surprised to hear his voice. "Oh, Seifer. Hello. Is Quistis around?"

"She's in the shower." He glances up at the closed bathroom door. The water is still beating away behind it. "What's up?"

"Nothing pressing. I was just calling to check in, like she'd asked."

He'd murder to be back in Dollet right now. Seifer pinches the bridge of his nose and wonders if Quistis has any aspirin. "Hana okay?"

"Perfect. She's very well-behaved—I put her down for bed a few hours ago. She's out like a light."

Seifer wants to have some sort of reaction, some smile, some laugh, because _he's _supposed to be the only one who can get Hana to sleep without a nightmare drama playing out beforehand. He has nothing, only relief that it isn't some sort of emergency that has Kadowaki calling them.

"She'll probably wake up screaming bloody murder at midnight, then." Just because Hana had gotten to the point where she'd sleep about five hours at a stretch at night didn't mean she actually _would_. "I'll pass along the message."

"Have a nice night, Seifer."

_Yeah, right. _"You, too."

He hangs up. Sometime during the brief call, the shower has cut off. Quistis opens the door, and comes out wrapped in a towel. Seifer sets her phone down on the table. The stone in her ring glints blue. He brushes his fingers across it.

"Did I miss a call?" she asks, glancing at her phone. She draws a long shirt from her duffel and tugs it over her head, then picks up the ring and sticks it back on her finger. The gesture is careless, just one more thing she has to remember to do.

"Just Kadowaki, checking in. Everything's fine." He gets up. The buttons on his shirt come undone, one after another, and he tosses the shirt on top of his bag.

"Did she say anything else?"

He wants to give her a sarcastic reply, but he comes up empty. Seifer shakes his head. "No. I got Rai's flight info, though."

"Oh," she says. "What time?"

"Little after noon." He reaches into the shower and shoves the nozzle upward; otherwise, the water hits him in the general vicinity of his ribs most of the time. The pressure is weak when he turns on the water, but it's hot, and that's all he really cares about right now. He doesn't bother shutting the bathroom door all the way. The shower is a square glass box; he strips off the rest of his clothes and steps inside, sliding the door shut behind him. Steam rises, and fogs the glass.

"We can ride to the airport together, then. Mine leaves at eleven."

"Yeah, I know." He's supposed to be _on _that damn flight.

"Seifer—" and he can barely hear her sigh over the drumbeat of the water against the glass around him. "I know this isn't a great idea, but…"

He scrubs at the wound across his knuckles with a thin bar of blue soap; it stings. Dammit, he'd meant to stop by the front desk and get a bandage. Seifer rinses the soap clean.

When he shuts off the water, there is silence. He slides the glass door open; she is still standing outside the bathroom door.

Seifer knots a towel around his waist and asks the question he's been putting off all evening. "How long do you want me gone?" _Do you even want me to come back?_

Her response surprises him.

"I don't want you to go at all." She steps aside to let him pass. "But you need to get yourself together."

He sighs in frustration and roots through his bag for the gym shorts he'd packed. He finds them, slides them on, and then pitches the towel back into the bathroom.

"I'm fine, okay? God, Quistis, I'm just a little stressed right now, alright? Or is that a crime?"

"Then _talk _to someone!" she cries. "Talk to Rai, talk to a psychiatrist, talk to _me_."

He'd rather throw himself out the fucking window, but they've painted the one in the hotel room shut and his fist bangs against the frame.

"What do you want me to _say_? That I'm pissed off because Edea is dead? That I'm upset because I thought I was _over _the shit she did to me during the war?" He gestures widely. "Pick one, babe, I'll _talk_ about it."

"What happened?" Her voice is quiet, and he can't handle the gentleness in it, like he is so goddamned _fragile._ "What did she do to you, Seifer?"

He _cannot _tell her—he cannot, he can't tear down this last line of defense he has. If he doesn't say it out loud, it didn't fucking happen; this is his rational, his childish retreat.

Quistis runs her hand in loose circles near the middle of his back.

"She mind-fucked me into sleeping with her, okay?" he snaps, turning away from the window to face her "That's what _happened_. That's the big, dark secret, because I was just her goddamned _puppet_, not her son, not someone she _loved—_"

The bed is under him, suddenly.

_Her hand reaches for his, beckoning him forward, to honor, glory, this woman he remembers only in fits and glimpses, because when Garden stuffs a GF in your brain they don't talk about how you might not remember your _parents_—_

_He takes her hand and he crosses into darkness. _

_xx_

Seifer drops onto the edge of the bed, like his legs have suddenly disobeyed him, and his fingers fist into the plain gray bedspread, so hard that she thinks he might tear through the mattress with the force of it.

She doesn't know what to say. She sits next to him. She reaches for his shoulder. Seifer jerks away from her touch.

"Seifer—"

She cannot even _begin _to fathom this, the darkness in his chest that he's carried for so long, that he's folded up and shoved away and thought he had buried, until Edea showed up again and dug it all back up.

Everything makes sense, now, the erratic moods, ever since Edea showed up in Dollet, the anger. How does one even _comprehend_ the idea that—

The sorceress, telling him to stay, to go—_are you a boy? Or a man?_

_I'm sorry, _is the most useless thing she can say.

"Sweetheart…"

Her endearment hangs in the air between them, a grenade with its pin pulled.

"Don't—just _don't_," Seifer says, and he will not meet her eyes. He stands, all broad shoulders and taut muscles and every inch of him is as familiar to her as her own body, and yet he won't _look _at her.

She slips her hand into his; he pulls away.

"Look, I'm exhausted. I'm going to bed. Do whatever you want."

He goes to the other side of the bed, pulling back unfamiliar covers and sliding under them. Every movement is precise, deliberate; he is in _control_ of these actions, perhaps the only thing he has control of anymore.

What the hell is he expecting her to do? Run from the room screaming? Doesn't he know her at _all_? She'd rather slit her own throat than leave him.

Quistis rises. She shuts off the bright overhead light, and slips beneath the blankets, sitting up against the padded headboard, drawing her knees to her chest.

Seifer is looking at her in the darkness, sprawled on his back. There is too much weight on his shoulders, and she wonders how he has not collapsed from it yet.

She doesn't touch him, resisting the urge to trace the planes of his arm, the dark outline of the SeeD tattoo on his skin, to push back some of his hair falling loose and damp into his face.

"How long?" Quistis asks; she cannot imagine sweet, gentle Edea doing anything like that, _ever. _But Ultimecia had been pulling all the strings, a master puppeteer. _How long_, she wants to know_, before she seduced you?_

_Cadet Almasy exhibits a tendency to be ruled by his emotions, making him an unpredictable candidate for SeeDxx_

Harsh words for a once-favored student. Quistis sits in the dark with her arms around her knees.

Eventually, he speaks. "I don't remember. D-District, maybe. I can't remember."

It had not taken long, then, before Ultimecia had broken him. D-District was a nightmare for everyone, it seems, not just Squall.

She doesn't know what she's waiting for. For him to start crying, perhaps, but she has never seen him weep, never imagined it possible. He will not breach that now, not here, not over this wreckage of history.

They have never talked about the war. It has never seemed necessary; it is an understanding between them, that it was a thing that happened to them.

_There is no good or bad. Just opinion and perspective. _

There is the villain, with his great gray coat and his gleaming blade, and there is the man before her now, the one person in the world she would die for without hesitation, without conscious thought.

His fingers brush her arm, a familiar path he has crossed a thousand times before.

"Why didn't you tell me sooner?" There is no accusation in her voice.

"It didn't matter. And we had enough to worry about. Besides, it's not like there's a good goddamned time to bring up something like that." He lets out a brief, bitter sound that might have once been a laugh. "I figured you'd run screaming."

She scoots down, sliding under the covers until her face is close to his. Seifer looks away.

He is wrong, it matters, it matters so much that it threatens to choke her with it. This damage is a part of him as much as the faded scar between his eyes.

She rests her forehead just above his heart; it is galloping in his chest.

_xx_

Early the next afternoon, Quistis sits next to him in one of the uncomfortable benches in Esthar's airport. She might as well be on the other side of the terminal. Seifer taps his boarding pass against his thigh, just to fill the silence.

"I'll call you in the morning," she says eventually. "Just to make sure you got in okay."

_Tap, tap, tap. _"I'll text you when I land."

"I'll still call."

There is a kiosk across the way that is selling coffee. He gets up. "Do you want anything?" he asks wearily, gesturing toward it. He is drained, like first-battle-junctioned weary, right down to his bones. He kind of wants to sprawl across six seats like Raijin is doing now, snoring like a freight train.

"No."

Seifer buys a cup of the overpriced brew, comes back, and sits down next to her. The paper is warm under his hands; when he drinks it, the liquid burns his tongue.

Quistis twists her ring around on her finger, over and over and over again. Does she even still want to marry him? She's still wearing the ring. That means something, right?

She's not going to abandon him.

He has no idea why he'd picked that word. _Abandon. _

There is a migraine building between his eyes. Seifer takes a sip of coffee. It warms him, but does nothing to alleviate the tension. This is bullshit. He shouldn't be leaving.

He wants to go back to their normal lives, ones without Garden, without witches, without funerals for people he does not want to mourn, without appointments made at early hours for neurologists and optometrists and a bunch of other –_ists_ he cannot name. She's got three or four of them this week alone.

Overhead, the speaker system announces the departing flight to Dollet. He stands, and Quistis puts her arms around him; her kiss is open-mouthed, hard against his lips. He does not want to let her go.

"We don't have to do this," he begins, and Quistis shakes her head.

"Just… take care of yourself, okay?"

She tells him she loves him; he has no idea if it's true anymore. Seifer watches her go, until she is swallowed up by the crowd. She is gone too quickly.

He slumps back in his seat.

Raijin sits up from his makeshift bed and yawns. "You guys okay?"

He is really fucking _tired _of people asking him that question. Seifer pitches his empty cup into a trashcan six feet away, aiming precisely. It is a perfect shot.

_xx_

The flight is unremarkable. She lands. She catches a cab. She goes home.

Dr. Kadowaki has left a note on the kitchen table in her scrawling hand, saying that she has taken Hana to the park. The house is silent, normally a refreshing change of pace.

Now it feels suffocating.

She unpacks with ruthless efficiency, and fills the laundry hamper the rest of the way. Quistis changes out of her travel clothes and into baggy track pants and a tank top with _Balamb Garden Athletics _stenciled on it in white letters. She scrapes her hair back into a ponytail, annoyed by the few strands that escape and fall into her face.

Her phone and house key go into the pocket of her pants, and she laces on her running shoes. The park is a mile loop. Maybe it'll help her relax.

She carries the laundry basket downstairs and starts a load. The machine rumbles in her wake as she leaves the house, locking the door behind her.

May is perfect spring in Dollet. She takes off down the sidewalk, her feet beating a solid rhythm against the concrete. There are a few people out; she nods to a couple of them, neighbors in the area.

She doesn't recognize most of the faces, though. They don't interact with a lot of people around here; they are the outcasts. No one is beating down the Trepe/Almasy door to be friends with them. Quistis runs. The salt-scented air fills her lungs.

She can't help but think about Seifer.

How much of it was consensual? How many times had he said no?_ It's not consensual, it's possession, it's rape. _

The word is a drum beat in her head as she runs.

The park is serene, filled with the laughter of little kids and couples strolling between the trees, hand-in-hand. She falls in behind a pack of joggers. Their conversation throws her pace, though, and she slips around them, putting on an extra burst of speed, dropping herself back into a light trance for a while, until she realizes that she's passed the playground twice and that someone is calling her name.

Quistis slows to a stop, shielding her eyes against the late afternoon sun. Dr. Kadowaki waves at her, gesturing her over. The older woman hasn't changed much at all, and greets her with a firm hug, despite the sweat on Quistis' skin. She supposes sweat isn't such a big deal in the grand scheme of Kadowaki's work.

Hana is stirring from slumber in her stroller; Quistis reaches in and gently lifts her daughter. Hana's eyes widen, startled by the action, until she recognizes her mother and a grin spreads across her face, the pacifier dropping from her mouth with the action. Quistis smiles at her. "Hi, sweetie," she says softly. She hadn't realized how much she'd missed Hana in the past forty-eight hours until right this second, and the force of it hits her like a truck. "How was she?" she asks Kadowaki.

"Oh," Kadowaki says with a grin, "she was an absolute angel. I don't know how, with all of that Almasy blood running through her, but she's a doll."

Hana is solid, warm and reassuring in her arms. It feels like she's gotten bigger; logically, Quistis knows that isn't possible. But still—"Really? She's usually very wary around people she doesn't know. I'm surprised."

"Happy as a clam the whole time," Kadowaki insists. "I'm sure she'll be happy to have you back, though. I assume Seifer's at home?"

Quistis sits on the park bench; Hana turns her head and nuzzles against her mother's neck. "He's… in Galbadia."

Kadowaki blinks at her. "What happened? You two didn't—"

Quistis shakes her head quickly. "No. No, we didn't. It just—seemed like a good idea, to let him have some space."

Kadowaki sighs. "Can't be easy, losing your mother like that. I didn't think they were really that close, though. Not after what happened."

_She hasn't been my mother for a long goddamned time. _

How much does Kadowaki know? Quistis aches to ask her, but she will not betray his confidence like that.

_She mind-fucked me into sleeping with her, okay? That's the big, dark secret._

She makes a noncommittal noise instead of outright answering.

"What about you? Are you going to be alright by yourself?"

It's a valid question, one to which Quistis Trepe does not have the answer. "I'll be fine," she tells Dr. Kadowaki. "Don't worry about me."

"I can stay for a day or so, if you think you'll need a hand."

"No, it's alright." Hana's fingers splay out along Quistis' collarbone. She presses her lips to the side of her daughter's head.

"I'll stay through the night," Kadowaki tells her firmly, picking up on her distraction. "Just so you can get some rest after your trip."

Quistis cannot come up with a compelling argument.

_xx_

There's something about travel that knocks him the hell out, and Seifer spends most of the five-hour flight to Deling City in a fitful slumber.

The roadhouse they stop in for dinner on the way to Raijin's place is everything his friend promised—loud and smoky, with peanut shells littering the floor that crunch under his shoes. The headache has abated, barely; the waitress sets down a pair of pints in front of them. It's a good brew, a Trabian ale he'll sometimes buy if he's feeling like spending money.

Tonight, it is wasted on him. Seifer drinks without really tasting it.

"You want to talk about it?" Raijin says after a minute.

"Not fucking really," Seifer replies.

So they get drunk in between mouthfuls of steak that tastes like ashes in his mouth, and talk about other things.

When the cab drops them off at Raijin's house, Seifer ambles down the hallway to the spare bedroom. Everything is still the same—Raijin has changed none of the décor. Fujin's hand is still evident _everywhere_.

"There's a towel in the bathroom, dude," Raijin yawns, passing by him to the bedroom at the end of the hall. Seifer grunts an acknowledgement, and closes the door to the guest room behind him. A shower seems like a good idea, but sleep seems like an even better one.

He falls face-first onto the bed and passes out for fourteen hours, fully dressed, a blanket haphazardly thrown across him. He wakes up sometime around noon, bleary and hung over and confused, to Raijin holding a phone in his face.

Seifer takes it. "'Lo?" he grunts, grinding the heel of his hand against his eyes one at a time, trying to clear some of the sleep crud.

"It's me."

Her voice is a sharp reality. Seifer eases up on the bed, the wall hard against his spine. His head is _killing _him. "Hey."

"Did I catch you at a bad time?"

"I was sleeping."

"It's after noon, Seifer."

He shrugs, remembers that she cannot see him, and says, "So?" It's not like he's got anywhere pressing to be.

"How was the flight?"

"Fine. Long. Yours?"

"Alright, I suppose."

_I miss you. _

"How's Hana?"

"She's good. Kadowaki said she was fine while we were gone."

"Okay."

There is a long silence. Eventually, he breaks it, before he feels compelled to fall asleep again. "You still there?"

"Yeah. Just… tired, I suppose. I was up late."

"Ah."

"I just wanted to check in. I'll let you go."

"Quistis—"

But she has already disconnected.

Seifer tosses the phone onto the bed and gets up, stretching wearily. A shower makes him feel at least half-human. Clean clothes and brushing his teeth put him at about fifty-five. The coffee that Rai's got brewing brings him somewhere up around seventy percent normal. He finds a bottle of ibuprofen in one of the cabinets, downs three, and washes it back with half a cup of coffee. Seifer refills the mug, and walks into the living room, where Rai's got a game on, playing at a low volume.

"You look like shit," Rai comments helpfully as Seifer eases himself down on the couch. "Old man."

"I'm old, you're fucking ancient."

"At least I can hold my alcohol, you know?"

He catches a glint of gold as Raijin lifts his own mug to his lips. It's been months since Fujin's funeral, and Raijin is still wearing his wedding ring.

The insult Seifer has dies on his lips. He drinks his coffee instead.


End file.
